Essaybypoole
Art By Antonio Gattorno
About
Gattorno - A Painter Of Surface and Symbol Gattorno - A Painter of Surface and Symbol Séan M. Poole Antonio Gattorno, a pioneer of Cuba’s Modernist Movement, was a versatile, innovative and enigmatic artist. His masterfully executed paintings are technically superb. His iconic imagery is mysterious and oftentimes misunderstood. Gattorno’s earliest paintings laid the foundation for and became the archetype of Cuban Modernism. Gattorno later developed a Neo-Romantic, surrealist style inspiring many critics to compare him to Salvador Dali. To this day, these paintings are powerful, sophisticated and puzzling. They are quite frequently misinterpreted. Emily Genauer, critic for the New York World Telegram, reviewing Gattorno’s solo exhibit at the Passedoit gallery on October 9, 1944, writes, “Gattorno is a painter of extraordinary technical skill and uninhibited imagination. I could wish he did not suggest Dali as strongly as he does. Occasionally, however, Gattorno puts into his paintings a strength of conviction and a concern with world problems that sets them apart from Dali’s dallyings.” Gattorno spent the years 1919 – 1927 in Europe. He was influenced by a wide variety of old Masters from Giotto, Titian, Veronesé, and Rafael, to contemporaries such as di Chirico and Modigliani. He became enmeshed in the vast tapestry of European art history with all of it’s epochs, movements and schools of thought. He developed a deep and abiding knowledge of symbolic visual language. He immersed himself in the study of style and technique. Antonio Gattorno perceived himself as a storyteller. He reveals himself as a narrative painter throughout every phase of his work. He exhibits a symbolist proclivity in his first as well as his final paintings. Critics frequently perceive him as a social crusader with a specific agenda - working to establish a visually unique Cuban national identity. Other critics classify Gattorno as a derivative of more successful contemporaries who never really developed his own style. Either of these assessments is inaccurate, revealing more about the critics than about the paintings or their author. This is not to say that Antonio Gattorno had no political message to convey nor does it suggest that he had no singular personal painting style. Gattorno was primarily a narrative painter, a storyteller working in light, color and image. He was a Symbolist painter in the truest sense. Gattorno believed that all paintings must be decorative and that all painting must be a meditative, creative process on the part of the artist. Politics were germane to him solely because being seen as politically relevant added credibility, importance and notoriety to the painter and his work. Making a political statement elevates decorative art to a lofty status where it seems somehow more important than mere adornment. Gattorno’s participation in the Cuban revolution of 1923 – 1934 was more likely the result of artistic opportunism th