Flower, Ships, and Other Dreams

By: Manuel Alvarez Lezama | Professor & International Art Critic

Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Flowers, Ships and Other Dreams” from February 27 to March 27, 1997 at the Art Gallery of the University of the Sacred Heart.

TIMELESS SIGNS

The echoes and the shadows. The secret forms. The timeless signs. The pulsing tongues of New York. The essential dreams from the Orient. The fairness of the white and the forces of the black. The souls of the grays. A way of poetry: The drawings of Raimundo Figueroa.

During the last 20 years, Raimundo Figueroa has established himself as a forceful and educated voice within the excellent choir of Puerto Rican abstract artists.

Encouraged, inspired and stimulated by the effervescent world of international abstractionism, he decided to construct an elaborate hymn of his own.

From very early in his career, his drawings and paintings reveal an innate abstract artist who needs to touch us through his work. Once in New York, surrounded by creators who were not afraid to enter new aesthetic dimensions, this diligent artist begins constructing the sophisticated and provoking visual discourse for which he is known today.

Through his compositions Figueroa challenges, us to become refined poets capable of combining the essence of Western abstractionism and the energy of Zen philosophy.

In the present exhibition, Flowers, Ships & Other Dreams, we see the work of a resourceful artist who has been able to integrate successfully the most refined elements of his distinctive visual syntax. The drawings on view can be read as three long and splendid poems. Composed of individual metaphors which take us too many different harbors, also as precious separate poems which contain the elegance, the mysteries Raimundo Figueroa is capable of as an artist.

Ships, flowers, hearts, circles, planets, wounds, wings, dreams, are all part of an enigmatic topography where drawing, the subconscious, beauty and freedoms become part of a celebratory ritual.

These drawings, which were conceived in New York, (at Annie Plum’s loft) 1995-1996, contain both, Raimundo Figueroa’s formal lyricism with the terrains of abstractionism and his passionate approach to expressionism. In them we will see fragments of our soul as we approach the end of the millennium, parts of a future and unknown map we have to construct in order to survive.

The dry volcano and the flower. Quicksilver. The memory of the circle. The short colors of desire. The ashen archangel. WE FLY.

About the writer: Manuel Alvarez Lezama is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras Campus) and the School of Plastic Arts of Puerto Rico. He is the critic for The San Juan Star newspaper and member of the International Association of Art Critics. (A.I.C.A.)