THE great Florentine Leonardo da Vinci was once overcome by illness and had to spend a number of days in bed. But such is the imagination of the artist that he found the experience interesting enough to refer to in his diary. Stretched out in bed and sleepless, he noticed the ceiling above him marked with waterstains like a vast map of the world. He squinted his eyes and the stains reconfigured into various images like fast-moving events of history, from the crowds at the square to warriors with galloping steeds raising clouds dust. And lying in bed, the artist would be rendered breathless in excitement. And even Picasso derived inspiration from the amorphous shapes of a passing cloud, a stone, a crumpled piece of paper.

But Cid Reyes says that he performs the reverse. From his notes in his current show Perception/Reality, he writes: “I abstract faces, landscapes, still lifes. From them I create a totally new reality using simply the plastic elements [lines, shapes, colors] and achieving balance, harmony, tension and order, or simply engaging/mystifying the viewer in the pleasurable experience of seeing.”  He said that he also refers to the timeless conflict between representation and abstraction.

With Reyes’s painting style, his work consists of layers upon layers of pigment in which human faces randomly emerge, like dark ghosts or bright apparitions, and again a layer of color, mostly red or gold, is passed over them to give a muted but precious effect. 

There are, of course, many types of abstraction, some of which are purely geometric and mathematical, some full of whimsy and spontaneity, while others consciously retain allusions and references to the real world, especially to organic life. But as he has described it, his abstract style is reductive in which the particularities, the individual specificities of human face and figure are glossed over in order, perhaps, to arrive at the essence, which is what classical idealist philosophy is concerned with. Such kind of abstraction would have greatly pleased Plato, whose aesthetics did not admit of straightforward mimesis, being a copy of an already defective copy of a specific individual who lived in the real world. 

There may be an unintentional signification to these paintings in which the human face is effaced to annul the entire emotional investment that surrounds identity. In this real world in our time, many have “disappeared” by military force and have never been seen again. Thus, they seem to be like phantoms and apparitions which appear and reappear in these works. They are half-concealed by a screen of brushwork behind which they mutely confront us. They do not, therefore, have the function of portraits. 

For portraits are required to be faithful to the likeness of the subject in order to assuage the fear of family members and close friends that, with the passage of time, the facial lineaments as known from memory will dissolve into oblivion. The portrait becomes the focus of all the emotions that surround the subject whose presence is brought to life in painting. This is the other extreme of reductive painting which has a general aura, perhaps of culture and poetry, but is grounded on formalist premises.

Reyes makes use of a number of techniques to enliven his present art. He can initiate a contrast between geometrism and spontaneity. For he sometimes lays down large geometric grounds of squares and rectangles and situates his proto-images of human faces in various areas.  Then, too, he uses the device of spontaneous lines like lively squiggles across the work, thus giving a sense of perpetual movement, like flying impulses over the visual field.  Apart from these, he also uses grattignures or scratches vertically and horizontally on the painting to maintain a lively texture.  There are also narrow, vertical black-and-white sections that seem to have references from the real world but are not made to develop into more intelligible forms.

Until now, Cid Reyes is still seemingly preoccupied with the “eternal conflict between representation and abstraction.” But he should rest assured that the vast developments in contemporary art have all but annulled such a distinction. For abstraction and representation are not antagonistic binaries because one can easily partake of the other. Much of the great productions today exhibit the happy fusion of the two, especially now that there is a wide array of media, from mixed media, multimedia to video installation. Artmaking in two- and three-dimensional forms use the style, medium and form which best express the meaning or message of the artist.

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