“Here is Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.”
Thomas Stearn Eliot –The Wasted Land.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.”
Thomas Stearn Eliot –The Wasted Land.
To become machine, to become mineral, to become caveman, to become and not to remember; to become, not to represent, machine, mineral or caveman. Such is the purpose of Francisco Urquizo Cuesta —who has recreated admirably the perplexity of the archaic man— in his exhibition titled "Tarot" which rather is an objection to ancient Tarot. To become cyclops, to become menhirs, to become sunflower. Not to remember that sometime we were those things, neither that we could have been it: to be it now. Not to remember but, in any case, to become reminiscence.
A man, alone, in the cold of a wasteland night, tired, starving and, perhaps, even deprived of conscience of his former existence, wants to know if his work is properly completed —a work that is a granitic matter still supple, which threatens to produce future, irremediable solidity. Who could judge the well finished work of an isolated man, deprived of reason and criterion? His work he can't behold, the darkness of the night forbids it to his carnal eyes, nobody can see it, due to his insurmountable retirement, and in the middle of this solitude he listens to a cold creak— the planets moving above his head, squeaking as if they were changing their position in the platforms of the skies, to better contemplate whats happening below, in the inhospitable plain. Then it seems as if he's having an inaugural reminiscence, an unclear memory, a first confusion.
These paintings possibly have some kind of megalithic memory, echoing from a past so remote that it asks not to be evoked —as if they had been painted by someone who returned to his caveman past, times of the world in which the roughness and the uncertainty conjugated, so the man, deprived of the grace of the artifice, had to strain to get a glimpse of destiny in the coarsest things, in the bare rock, in the water, in the broken egg of the bird or the debilitated reptile, in the mane tangled in the thistle, in the dry, cracked femur at the bottom of the crag, in the black cloud, in the gale.
In the Tarot painted by Urquizo there's no longer a future to incarnate, because is evident that everything is made of the same substance, everything is linked like the underground little roots that spread on vast surfaces in which, regardless of how much they expand, always a filament will join the most distant fiber with the first one. Like Proust, who does not remind Venice but himself becomes a reminding of Venice, he shows that this common material expires, and then gods appear instead of Destiny, and gods no longer speak of Destiny but of Eternity, in which this profuse mass that forms the bird, the forest, the beggar or the king becomes insignificant. In the troglodyte wielding a sharp-pointed bone resided the kernel of today's Urquizo, slept his potential work; a providential contingency, a fortuitous encounter in this rhizome in which both resided, was barely enough for the caveman to create, in Urquizo, Urquizo's painting.
The creaking of the stars, of their secret gears, becomes increasingly audible and frightening in the silent night. Then, the man in the wasteland, in blind isolation, senses the gods showing themselves. He begins to comprehend his own work, which he made with his own hands and the darkness had concealed from him: the stars are examining it, judging it from the highest points. He is aware of this; so then, frightened, he tries to improve his work, in the dark, so the stars won't be offended by the blemish, to make it worthy of them. However, this attempt to improve his work ends up being an expression of his worry for the future, and he fails to see that, in the eyes of the gods, such a worry is a fault.
That's why in the Tarot, in Urquizo's paintbrush, there no longer are arcane secrets; there's no mystery in the enigmatic hanged man, without his upset smile nor his transom of timbered logs. Now he’s hanging from the stone, he himself is stone, he himself is chariot or emperor or devil. In Urquizo Cuesta's series, the Destiny, which the fearful human look would decipher in the ancient Tarot, yields to the legitimacy of the entropy, of the primigenial disorder. There is no destiny, instead there is mutability. There are no secrets but caducity. We will not find the future of man, but returns to the beginnings, Samsara's endless chain. The hermit fuses with the desert, in Urquizo's work, as well as the magician makes of his own hand a magic prodigy. The arcane secrets turn into truth, accuracy; what to us means long lapses, entire epochs, worlds, galaxies, to the vigilant gods it is but a blink; what to us is a water drop, to the gods is the Cosmos; what to us is the stout Destiny, the embrace of perpetual Death, to them it is Eternity.
