The works of this internationally known artist are between abstraction and cubism. They also confess the influences of Joan Miro, of Klee from pre-Hispanic cultures.
Despite being a cosmopolitan painter, who has worked and exhibited in hundreds of cities around the world, Szyszlo has always looked at his roots, which is prodigious in a world that is losing value every day. The reason for this is perhaps in the fact that he was trained as an artist at a time when the world was concerned with the idea of authenticity.
The well-known Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa thinks that painting in Latin America has always been threatened by two kinds of frustration: ruralism and cosmopolitanism. The first, says the author of “La ciudad y los perros”, is a bondage to the crazy, a suffocation that results from flying too low, from confusing the branch with the forest, from turning the plastic creation into a craft and a folklore, in the factory of picturesque objects. The second, on the other hand, defines it, as a slave to the universal, an asphyxia due to excess of imitation and lack of invention, to dissolve within the impersonal, in that swift change of whims that the great cultural centers propose. Vargas Llosa believes that very few painters have managed to conjure up both dangers, creating a disdainful work of both attitudes and his compatriot Fernando de Szyzslo is one of them. That opinion of the writer is shared by most of those who know the work of the Peruvian painter. All emphasize that Szyszlo mixes the modern with the ancient excellently well and that he tended a bridge between European abstraction and prehispanic craftsmanship.
There are even critics who point out that the greatest feat of the artist is to have managed to print a Peruvian accent in an apparently unraveled art.
The works of this internationally known artist are between abstraction and cubism. They also confess the influences of Joan Miro, Klee and pre-Hispanic cultures “in their fabrics are present the economy of means, the purity and lightness of forms, the sobriety of design, the softness of the sands of Chancay and Lurín, and the mystery of sea”, said an expert.
Szyszlo speaks of modern man and interprets that being full of doubts, experiences, “ he paints man searching for the meaning of some hidden mystery, the truth about uncertainty and sacrednd , in a world where all kinds of sacrifices are made and where offerings are needed to bring us closer to what has no explanation. And in those forms loads of meaning palpitate the anguish, which is a dense experience”, said Ana María Escallón, ex director of the Art Museum of the Americas based in Washington.
The profile of a Latin American. Despite being a cosmopolitan painter, who has worked and exhibited in hundreds of cities around the world, Szyszlo has always looked at his roots, which is prodigious in a world that is losing value every day. The reason for this is perhaps in the fact that he was trained as an artist at a time when the world was concerned with the idea of authenticity.
Szyslo arrived in Europe when the cultural scene was dominated by the existentialists. In the old continent, he met the apostle of surrealism, André Breton, who was always an admirer of archaic traditions, especially those of Latin America. Then he traveled to Italy, where he became familiar with the works of the founders of the pictorial tradition. At first he copied, as an exercise, the great Florentine paintings and then developed the artistic approaches of Cubism, Latin American regionalism, Mexican nationalism and European In formalism until he found a personal and unique way of expressing himself.
“Like most Latin American artists and poets in the great capitals of Europe, they had to touch bottom to discover their own inner world. And that is why his stay in Europe had made him what he was: a painter who always seeks to express himself as he really was: a hybrid and excited that sought the truth of his existence not only as a modern Universalist, but also as a man raised in a certain place rich in artistic traditions” recalled the American critic Dore Ashton.
With this, the expert did not mean that Szyszlo was dedicated to native art. No, because the work of this painter is light years away from folklore. In his paintings there are ceremonial altars, lots of staircases of pre-Hispanic temples, references of knives, colors of textiles. But despite these allusions, Szyszlo’s painting can not be blamed for being localist: “In each work there are signs that show how the artist finds himself in the whole universe looking for analogies”, concludes Ashton.
