Painting is one of the oldest and still powerful forms of communication in Western culture. For 30,000 years, artists have relied upon two basic forms of pictorial expression: representation, which produces identifiable images comparable to things in the real world, and abstraction, which relies on marks and shapes as well as color, space, pattern, and scale to convey the endurance, transcendence, or flux of life itself. Simultaneously speaking the languages of representation and abstraction, San Antonio painter Jerry Cabrera investigates the choreography and masquerade of the bullfight, a Spanish and Latin American tradition inherited from ancient Rome. Like Francisco de Goya, Edouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso before him, Cabrera is drawn to the life-and-death ritual as a spectacular drama. In Cabrera’s paintings, however, the chauvinistic heroism associated with the bullfight is usurped by a cinematic obsession with rich color and graceful motion. By refusing to picture the protagonists—the matador and bull while retaining the illusionistic space of the bullring and highly detailed, billowing three-dimensionality of the cape, Cabrera deals with abstract issues in the guise of representation.

Jerry Cabrera, Cape Facing Bull, 2006, Oil on canvas
Collection of the University of Texas at San Antonio

The realistically painted mise-en-scčne—the scene-setting background—includes the bullring’s red fence and low white railing (allowing the bullfighter to quickly surmount the fence) as well as the sandy ground of the arena. The warm golden sunshine of an afternoon accentuates the shadows beneath and in the folds of the ghostly cape as well as the railing, contributing to the believability of the scene. Legible in varying degrees from painting to painting, the space occupied by the now-missing bullfighter is, in contrast, flat and without substance; our attention shifts to the frozen gestures and gallant arabesques. The subject of the paintings is the action of the cape. Stressing activity over imagery, Cabrera calls them “Verb Paintings.”

Based on photographs of actual bullfights, the scenes are drawn from the first stage of the Spanish corrida when the formal gold and magenta cape is used to gauge the bull’s aggressiveness. Like the paintings overall, the duality of representation and abstraction is echoed in the figure of the cape. In contrast to the real cape draped over a handbuilt abstract support recalling the red wall and white railing, in the paintings the cape is only variously colored, glazed, and blended brushstrokes. With chromatic warmth and compositional verve, the inert subject of the sculpture is transformed into a dynamic force by the sensitive touch and skillful brush of the artist.

Frances Colpitt
June 2007

Credits for show:
NALAC Fund for the Arts
Ford Foundation
JP Morgan Chase Foundation
The Cultural Collaborative
Brown Foundation, Inc.
San Antonio Office of Culturals Affairs