Baruj Salinas: A Focus on the Infinite

On Friday, May 14th, the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora held the opening reception for its new retrospective of renowned Cuban master Baruj Salinas. From the start, this was a unique event. Ordinarily, an artist considers it a notable achievement to hold such a major career milestone in a museum rather than a gallery or other venue. In this case, however, it is considered a major coup for the relatively new museum, which opened in 2016, to host such a globally recognized artist with works in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Israel Museum, and the Vatican. The pairing proved an undeniable triumph for both. 

The Museum provided a meaningful venue not only to house but enhance Salinas’ oeuvre with both layout and context due to the Museum’s focus on the Cuban exile experience. Of course, for Salinas, exile and exodus hold an added layer of relevance due to his Jewish identity and ancestry. When seen through the lens of exile, the retrospective essentially illustrates how the traumatic loss of his homeland led Salinas to find himself and achieve international recognition. In the process, his work would transcend both the Cuban diaspora as well as Miami’s growing art community, elevating each of their profiles along the way. As one of the last remaining founders of Miami’s thriving cross-cultural Latin American art market, curating a retrospective for an artist of Salinas’ caliber is certainly an imposing task. In Baruj Salinas: 1972-2022, curator Adriana Herrera chose to tackle the challenge by limiting her scope to the previous 50 years of his career, essentially showing the progression of his emergence from humble beginnings into one of the highest-profile living artists in Miami. Herrera further refined her focus into a selection of four compelling themes: “Cosmogonies,” “Inhabitant of the Clouds,” “Forests and Telluric Forces,” and “The Torah Project.”

While this approach inevitably leads to an incomplete assessment that misses, for example, Salinas’ highly underrated early figurative-Expressionist works of the 1960s, it trades completeness for impact. On full display is Salinas’ unique brand of Abstract Expressionism, in which forms and ideas are often vaguely suggested and selectively defined enough to encourage and facilitate the viewer in crafting their own interpretations. Therein lies a paradox found throughout Salinas’ work on display: the pairing of suggestion with potent emotion. This method allows his works to reflect the essence of the human experience and philosophical yearnings in a spiritually transcendental manner. As such, each piece acts as a layered scrying mirror into the collective unconscious of humanity. This reveals an exactly-executed balance between Salinas’ intellect and intuition. Guiding that balance within him is a well-honed focus into the nameless realm of senses, thought, feeling, and abstraction — for Salinas, this realm is his doorway to the Infinite. Here we see his winning formula of leading with intuition, without questioning his inspirations or motives, and then sharpening and refining with intellect upon arriving at his destination in each work.

Salinas is in a rare category of artists that can truly claim to be direct heirs to the original mid-century New York School of the AbEx movement. His work plainly makes the case more effectively than any one argument. When you stand in front of one of his large-scale works, such as Archipiélago (2012), you feel the same over-encompassing, the immersive effect from Salinas’ art that you feel from the most dramatic Jackson Pollock creations. Salinas’ AbEx links are reinforced by his frequent use of gestural action painting. He then brings the mid-century movement into the 21st century by employing various innovative mixed-media techniques that include incorporating oil, acrylic, ink, crayon, graphite, and sediment mixtures into his pieces. These elements converge into otherworldly ranges in color, saturation, and texture. 

The sediment-mixing technique is especially effective in creating more palpable energy in several works on display, such as 2012’s Arrecife (Reef), which introduces the “Forests and Telluric Forces” portion of the exhibition. As curator Adriana Herrera points out in the exhibition brochure, the sediment technique literally brings the earth into the artwork. This, in turn, is rebalanced by sealing the sediment in gloss and infusing color to return the emphasis onto abstraction and reflection, once again bridging the dense and concrete with the formless and ethereal within a single work. This highlights the Abstract Expressionist concept of works representing a visual “receipt” of an almost shamanic creative journey undertaken by the artist into their personal inner realms, which in turn connects with grander archetypes and myths of the universal human experience. In this approach, the final work serves to represent the end result — and literal surface — of that deeper process. This experience is then completed when the viewer meditatively enmeshes into this expression and emerges with new revelations of the Infinite from within their own inner worlds. 

The finest AbEx works to achieve this effect, and each of Salina’s works here succeeds as powerful portals to his inner world of spirituality, as well as springboards into aspects of the human condition that transcend — and predate — verbal expression. Each brushstroke marks a momentary brainwave that leaves only a smeared drop of the stream beneath it. While the fullness of the stream cannot be seen in its entirety, its pull can be felt in each completed work, leading the viewer to see beyond its formal qualities into the depths of a richer experience. Symbol, color, and flow unveil layers that carry the mind off to corners of the soul we may never have meditated on, yet existed in some suspended form, waiting to be discovered and dipped into. This journey encapsulates a boundless raw essence with nuance and does not chase art trends, further ensuring an eternally-fresh work that stands the test of time and scrutiny.

This retrospective places particular emphasis on Salinas’ recurring explorations of symbol and form as ancient containers for the indescribable, such as the creation and the mystical. Since embracing abstraction in the 1970s, his landscapes — whether clouds, forests, oceanic, cosmic, or inner — have all been emotive rather than literal. His voyages within have, therefore, almost alchemically elevated the viewers’ perception of the universe through its use of deceptively simple images, such as a single letter, a cloud, or a sea wave. This grasping at the connection of the infinite within and beyond us represents the utmost peak of what fine art can strive to achieve… and, in several works here, he attains it. While his fellow Grupo GALA artist Rafael Soriano is rightly remembered for his emphasis on universal mystical themes throughout his celebrated career, Salinas’ own decades-long exploration of the subject matter across various series also deserves attention and study. In this retrospective, these works are finally given the opportunity to stand in their own light — and illuminate the soul.

Salinas’ bold mastery of various mediums and, most impressively, various scales are also showcased to strong effect. One special highlight is the hypnotic NÚCLEO (Nucleus), a massive work created 50 years ago with a title that metaphorically signals the beginning of the timeframe of this exhibition: 1972. While it does carry the feel of the mid-century “Atomic Age” of the 1950s and 1960s, it also shows a deeper genesis of his journey to reach beneath the surface of the visible world around him and into the unseen essence, as illustrated by the amorphous figure taking shape in the center of the piece, surrounded by the highly structured concentric pattern radiating around it. With its methodical, mandala-like formation, NÚCLEO does nod to geometric abstraction, though it also shows the embers of his more nebulous later abstraction. It can even be interpreted as unconsciously foreshadowing hints of his Language of the Clouds series in both the glowing explosive cloud-like central figure and the subtle tones of still-unformed static haze surrounding the emanating orbs. 

Yet, in this work, the most powerful message is both the simple and complex profundity of the circle. As Jungian comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell had often noted, the circle may well be the most archetypal of all shapes. Since ancient times, the circle has held the cycles of life and nature, as we see with Stonehenge. In the case of the original Hindu-Buddhist mandalas, it opened geometric gateways to understanding the universe, as well as one’s place within it. In the West, we have seen similarly profound usage of circular imagery manifested into a spiritual journey by way of Medieval mediative labyrinths, such as the famed mystical labyrinth of Chartres Cathedral. Dating to the 13th century, this circular labyrinth was designed to mirror its celestial rose window, essentially projecting one ornate circle from the Heavens onto the Earth. 

As opposed to the personal meditative use of mandalas, a religious labyrinth serves as a communal aid to connect with the divine by journeying into one’s spiritual inner world. Considering Salinas’ background in architecture, this interpretation, rooted in Sacred Geometry, would not have been lost to him at the time. Through its scale and geometry, NÚCLEO is effectively both a personal mandala and communal labyrinth, guiding the viewer into its many layers of circles from the personal to the universal. In his own career, it can also be seen as a defining symbol of the final stage of Salinas’ professional transition from architecture to the arts on a full-time basis during this period.

CLOUDSCAPE: TO LIFE (HAI) was completed this year and therefore anchored the other range of the spectrum as among his most recent works. This piece brings in several signature Salinas motifs that developed during the rapid artistic maturing that took place during his 20-year Barcelona period. First and foremost, it is part of Salina’s famous and ongoing Language of the Clouds series, which is essentially the ultimate artistic Rorschach test. This ethereal series is defined by nebulous forms and an impressive range of subtle gradations in tone influenced by the limited color palette of his surroundings in Barcelona, which were dominated by the color gray. Here, Salinas shows just how much can be conjured within the many tones of grays, silvers, and whites. Whether light and airy or dense and heavy, one can almost sense a movement in the mists within these pieces that hold the potential of everything while revealing no concrete conclusions.

HAI also features one of his ancient glyphs, a theme he explored deeply in his collaborations of the time, such as those with Japanese print master Masafumi Yamamoto and with the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente. As with all of Salinas’ glyphs, this symbol, the Jewish character “Hai” (also spelled “Chai”), is rich in meaning. While it is broadly translated as “life,” many of its associations emerge from spiritual contexts, such as the Kabbalah — a subject Salinas has explored in several previous works — as well as numerology, where it is often equated with the number 18. 

The symbol has also been used as an amulet for centuries. Here it carries the sense of a deeply profound biblical message from the Heavens. This divine message carries an edge of poignancy when one considers it was executed in 2021-2022 against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and its persistent reminders of the fragility of life. It is, therefore, not out of place with Salinas’ recent work with The Torah Project, a high-profile commission that explores plagues, the primordial, divine revelation, and other spiritual themes relating to the Hebrew Bible and is eventually presented to Pope Francis and blessed in a 2017 ceremony with Salinas in attendance. HAI reminds us that images, and therefore symbols, predate language and often carry stronger communicative power that penetrates the unconscious of shifting perceptions in a lasting way.

Another clear highlight is Nocturnal Emission (1999) which has a palpable presence strong enough to create its own psychological center of gravity in its surrounding space. In stark contrast to his famed clouds, this is a literal explosion of dense color and texture. Its title and volcanic imagery suggest it is not only a surfacing manifestation of the human unconscious but of the depths of the Earth itself, embodying creation through the chaos and vice versa. It also reaffirms Salinas’ bona fide claims as a colorist despite the pronounced, long-running neutrality of his Barcelona-period works. It signals his bold readoption of color and, more broadly, an embrace of vitality over European cerebral subtlety upon return to Miami – a city defined by color, saturation, and passion. Emission could easily be the centerpiece of any serious art exhibition, though here it contends with several much larger works — and still more than holds its own. Simply put, it is impossible to ignore and must be experienced in person. Representing a rough mid-point in the 50-year timespan, this may well be the most impactful piece of the retrospective.

Perhaps more than any one work, style, or series, a legacy was on display just as strongly as his skill on opening night. To illustrate the arch of Salinas’ career and how he encapsulates the ever-evolving “contemporary” of fine art conventions, Salinas has taught emerging artists for decades and continually brings experimentation into the center of his approach, normalizing it for future generations. This legacy was evident as the Miami arts community came out in full force to show the wide respect Salinas holds across the field. This included multiple generations of admirers as collectors, curators, fellow artists, and community leaders, as well as several younger attendees, all demonstrating the collective draw and staying power of Baruj Salinas’ work. 

This relationship runs deep. Since the beginnings of Salinas’ career in exile, he has seen Miami emerge from a sleepy mid-sized vacation town with a largely seasonal market of tourism cycles to a leading international arts hub that, as Latin American art scholar Ricardo Pau-Llosa has noted, is now firmly established as the “bi-hemispheric” main cultural axis linking North American, Latin American, African, and European art on surprisingly equal terms. His own career has not only mirrored this growth but actively contributed to developing it.  

Reflecting on the process behind this exhibition and its meaning to him, Salinas said: “I was working on this retrospective, alongside Adriana Herrera, the curator, and Rina Carvajal, the director of MDC MOAD at Freedom Tower, for about a year and a half. Without a doubt, this is the best and most comprehensive exhibition of my career.” 

He added: “Although it is not a full retrospective, it does cover 50 years of my artistic output. At first, the exhibition was going to be presented in one of the exhibiting rooms of the Freedom Tower. But as the building had been developing structural problems, Rina decided to search for another venue. She finally decided on the spaces of the Cuban Museum, and the result has been, in my opinion, one that allowed me to show three times the amount of works that I would have been able to exhibit at the Tower. The process has taken that much time, and I, in particular, am happy with the way the exhibition finally turned out.” (June 2, 2022).

By just about any metric, the exhibition has already proved to be a success from the strength of its opening night and the works that remain. In his rhythmic yet fluid focus, Salinas reveals surprising spectrums of color within the gray of clouds, the muted earthy greens of rushes, and the dark, primordial abyss of oceans, space, and creation itself from the void. This Zen-like focus stretches the singularity of any one work, and within any of us, into the infinite. 

Last Updated on May 23, 2023