Posts Tagged ‘painting’

“Ricardo F. Morín”

May 18, 2026

*

During those first years through 1976, Buffalo accumulated heavier snowfalls than usual, with blizzards exceeding those of previous winters.  In some neighborhoods the snow rose beyond the rooftops of houses.  The wind crossed the streets with an intensity unfamiliar to someone who had grown up in Valencia, Venezuela.  In the art studios of Bethune Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, canvases leaned against one another while students worked for hours in silence or beneath scattered conversations.  The smell of oil, turpentine, and damp wood continuously permeated the interiors.

He had arrived in the United States in 1972 at seventeen years of age.  Displacement did not consist solely in leaving one country behind.  It also altered the daily perception of the simplest things:  the scent of cities, winter light entering through windows, the relation between the body and climate, the constant sound of a language still only partially familiar.

Before Buffalo there had been Valencia.  The Arturo Michelena School of Fine Arts.  The first hours of drawing during childhood.  Later, during adolescence, the summers studying painting in the private studio of the Hungarian painter Lazlo Lenyel.  Even then, however, painting seemed less a future profession than a form of attention.  Preparing the surface of a canvas produced an experience difficult to explain outside the act of painting itself.

During those years canvases began accumulating rapidly.  Some were destroyed.  Others remained leaning against walls for months before receiving another layer of paint.  The organization of the studio changed constantly.  Painting did not yet follow a precise theory.  There was instead a physical insistence:  returning each day to observe relations of color, spatial tension, surface, and rhythm.

In 1976 he returned briefly to Venezuela.  There he studied privately with the Málaga-born artist José Luis Montero before returning once again to Buffalo under the guidance of Herta Kane and James Jipson.  Gradually the first exhibitions began.  In May of that same year he presented “Works by Ricardo Morin” at the Villa Maria College Gallery.

Conversations about art during those years frequently revolved around movements, historical legitimacy, abstraction, expressionism, or formal theory.  Yet many of the most intense hours occurred far from any discourse.  Remaining alone in the studio, slowly shaping how certain surfaces retained or rejected light, seemed to contain an experience more concrete than many of the explanations later constructed around the work.

In 1977 the Venezuelan Ministry of Education awarded him a full scholarship to complete a B.F.A. at SUNY Buffalo.  The thesis exhibition, Buffalo Series 1979, was later curated by Seymour Drumlevitch at the Alamo Gallery of the State University of New York at Buffalo. [1]  Shortly afterward, Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980, received the Birge Wall Covering Award and the Reed Foundation Award at the 38th Western New York Show at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. [2]

Awards, exhibitions, and scholarships briefly made continuity seem attainable.  During certain periods it seemed possible to imagine a relatively stable professional trajectory.  Yet that stability coexisted with another sensation more difficult to name:  the persistent impression that the real work was taking place elsewhere, far from the forms through which it was publicly interpreted.

In 1979 he attended stage design seminars taught by Gunther Schneider-Siemsen at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg.  There he received the Förderungspreis Leistung der Stadt Salzburg award.  Shortly afterward Drumlevitch recommended that he apply to the M.F.A. program of the Yale School of Drama.

At Yale the theater workshops functioned on another scale of production.  Constructions, lighting, scenic architecture, models, and technical equipment occupied spaces inside buildings adapted for the stage.  Physical labor was continuous.  Stage design also offered a concrete possibility of economic survival within New York.

During the first years after Yale he worked as a set designer in New York’s Off-Off-Broadway circuit, collaborating with Irene Fornés and Max Ferrá at INTAR. [3]  At the same time he worked as principal assistant to established Broadway designers.  Workshops, constructions, and rehearsals occupied much of the days and nights.

By the late 1980s he obtained a loft in Tribeca devoted exclusively to painting.  Large-format canvases leaned against high walls while painting once again began occupying the center of daily life.  The studio was filled with accumulated materials:  stretchers, pigments, tools, fragments of canvas, and drawings tacked against the walls.

At certain moments it seemed possible to sustain both lives simultaneously:  theater and painting.  New York still retained industrial areas where some artists could work within relatively spacious environments.  Yet even during those years of greatest professional activity, a tension persisted between the public continuity of a career and the quieter experience of the work itself.

In 1993 interruption appeared.  Due to AIDS he was forced to abandon the loft, suspend professional activity, and return to Venezuela seeking refuge with his family.  The diagnosis rapidly altered the entire structure of daily life.  Many previous continuities disappeared within a few months:  work, economic stability, studio, city, professional rhythm.

Between 1993 and 1996 his health deteriorated considerably.  He spent long periods inside the family home with little physical energy and frequent medical interruptions.  It was then that the Aposentos series began.  The second painting of the series, Aposento No. 2, was selected for the “XIV Municipal Painting Salon: Homage to Carlos Cruz-Diez,” held in 1994 at the Municipal Art Gallery of Maracay. [4]

He painted slowly.  Canvases remained stacked against the walls for entire weeks before receiving another intervention.  The body fatigued quickly.  Light shifted inside the room while the paintings remained motionless for hours or entire days.  At times the work advanced only a few centimeters.

Painting then began acquiring another rhythm.  It no longer seemed to respond solely to the continuity of a career or to the possibility of exhibition.  Some works emerged more as accompaniment than affirmation.

During those same years he worked voluntarily at Fundación Metaguardia, created in Valencia as a center of information and support for people with terminal illnesses, many of them also living in conditions of indigence.  The foundation integrated emotional support, activities connected to the arts, and pro bono medical services.

Silent conversations, long periods of waiting, weakened bodies, and shared vulnerability slowly altered the perception of many previous categories.  Illness seemed to render secondary many differences that had previously organized much of daily attention.

In 1996 he finally returned to New York in order to access the new antiretroviral treatment.  His immunity was practically nonexistent.  Soon afterward he sought assistance from the Department of Human Resources because of his condition of destitution.  He first stayed at the transitional Paradise Hotel in the Bronx and later at the Common Ground program at the Hotel Times Square.

Paradise was a profoundly unstable place.  Narrow corridors, moldering rooms, and constant precariousness altered the perception of time.  Some people disappeared suddenly.  Others remained locked inside their rooms for entire days.  The noise of doors, televisions, and arguments continuously crossed through the walls of the building.

Even so he continued painting.  Small canvases rested against walls or on improvised furniture near the window.  The continuity of the work no longer depended upon ideal conditions.  It depended only upon continuing to work within whatever circumstances were available.

During those years an unexpected sensation of emptiness also appeared.  Not necessarily as absolute loss, but rather as a gradual reduction of the interior noise through which ambition, identity, or permanence had once been sustained.  Within that emptiness certain forms of attention slowly began acquiring greater intensity:  breathing, light upon surfaces, the rhythm of the body while walking through the city, the noise of certain rooms, the momentary presence of familiar faces.

In September 1998 he received support from the New York organization Visual AIDS, which organized a joint exhibition based on watercolor and oil portraits together with Nicolo Cataldi at St. Mark’s Church.  Later came other collective exhibitions and alternative platforms.  Some of the paintings from the early 1990s were later described by the artist Jo-ey Tang as “love letters to the city of New York”.

In 2000 he received a VESID rehabilitation grant that included specialized training in digital tools and computer equipment.  The computer then slowly became incorporated into the visual work.  Between 2000 and 2003 he used digital media combined with watercolor and hand drawing to reinterpret fifteenth-century Persian miniatures through geometric processes of reconstruction. [5]

Later, between 2005 and 2012, he taught a course titled Pictorial Perspective at Pratt Institute.  Meanwhile he developed the Triangulation Series, working with suspended geometries, reduced spaces, and hanging formats. [6]

After completing chemotherapy in 2008 for an AIDS-related Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, systemic muscular disorders began preventing him from even stretching large canvases.  The hanging canvases then emerged also as a direct consequence of physical limitations.  The body slowly began imposing another relation to space, time, and work.

The canvases remained suspended for weeks while light varied across the surfaces.  Physical movements were slower.  Material reduction altered perception as well.  Silence ceased feeling like absence and began functioning as another form of attention.

Between 2009 and 2010 he initiated the Metaphors of Silence series. [7]  Many of the works emerged slowly within prolonged periods of physical stillness.  The need to explain aesthetic experience intellectually gradually began losing intensity before the experience of observation itself.

During those same years he collaborated with Dr. Andrew Irving in an experimental project on art, anthropology, and human experience related to New York Stories.  Part of those dialogues were later incorporated into The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice. [8]

With the passing of years certain tensions slowly began losing sharpness.  Illness remained present, although it no longer organized each moment of the day in the same way.  Certain forms of ambition or anxiety surrounding continuity, recognition, or permanence seemed gradually to diminish without disappearing entirely.

Painting continued occupying a central place, though no longer necessarily as an exclusive affirmation of identity.  Other things also remained:  conversations, walks, reading, physical exercise, breathing finding rhythm again, the momentary attenuation of certain aches, light changing across the surfaces of the city, brief encounters throughout the day.

Some afternoons he continued walking slowly while breathing found rhythm and light descended across the buildings.  Aging, fragility, and the proximity of death did not disappear.  Neither did they remain completely separate from the movement of existence itself.

Ricardo F. Morín

May 17, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

Endnotes

[1] Buffalo Series 1979:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/62.html

[2] Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/53.html

[3] Theater productions and press references:
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/17/theater/stage-lovers-at-intar.html

[4] Aposento No. 2:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/11.html

[5] Platonic Interactions Series and related works:
https://www.artmajeur.com/en/rfmorin/artworks?page=5

[6] Triangulation Series:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/Triangulation_Series.html

[7] Metaphors of Silence:
https://ricardomorin.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/metaforas-del-silencio/

[8] Andrew Irving, The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice:
https://www.academia.edu/53478128/The_Art_of_Life_and_Death_Radical_Aesthetics_and_Ethnographic_Practice_Andrew_Irving_Chicago_Hau_Books_2017_264_pp

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“Unattainable Gestures”

June 14, 2025

“Echoes of a life devoted to the elusive”

*

Ricardo F Morin
Triangulation Series Nº 38
9” x 13”
Oil on linen
2009

*

In memoriam José Luis Montero

For him, inspiration didn’t strike—it settled.    It arrived not with answers, but with permission to begin.

There was no ritual.    No dramatic turning point.    Only the canvas, the scent of oil, the shifting light across the floor.    One day folding into the next, until the work became its own weather—sometimes clear, sometimes stormy, but always present.

He believed in attention, not mastery.

What moved him wasn’t how the painting was achieved at any given moment, but when deconstructed he had to reclaim it, not out of skill, but out of necessity—when the hand moved before thought, and something more honest than intention began to lead.    And when it happened, it asked everything of him.

Any one watching—anyone but him—would have seen very little.    A trace.    A pause.    A slight adjustment.    But inside, something in him was listening—not to himself, but to the world, the material, the echo of a form not yet known.

He didn’t make work to be remembered, though he carried each piece like a child of his.    He made it to stay alive.    And when he encountered a finished painting years later, it stirred him physically.    It wasn’t nostalgia.    It was the smell of pigment, the sound of bristles, the grief of something nearly realized—lost, then found again.

Some days, the work moved with a kind of ease.    Other days, it refused.    He learned not to chase either.

He always began without knowing what he was after.    A shade.    A flicker of transparency.    A stroke that unsettled the surface.    Often the brush would stop midair, suspended while he waited for the next move to reveal itself.    Sometimes nothing came.    Those pieces sat untouched for weeks—a quiet unease in the corner of the room.

He lived alongside their silence.

The studio was never clean, but always ordered.    Rags folded.    Jars fogged with old turpentine.    Walls bearing soft outlines of past canvases.    The mess wasn’t careless.    It was lived-in—not careless, just lived-in.    Notes of Goethe’s pyramidal harmony hung besides mineral samples, sketches, color wheels, torn letters from art dealers.    Not for revelation—but for proximity.

Not every piece held.    Some failed completely.    Others, losing urgency layer by layer, failed gradually,    He kept those too—not as records, but as reminders.    Where the hand had gone quiet.    Where the work had ceased to ask.    Yet they became platforms—spaces for later returns, for deeper entry.

His days had no fixed schedule, though a rhythm formed over the years—a long devotion, interrupted, resumed, endured.

Now, he arrived late morning from the City.    The studio held the faint scent of wax and turpentine, laced with something older—dust, fabric, memory.    He opened a window if weather allowed.    Not for light but for air.    For movement.    For the slow turning of the fans like breath.

He made tea.    Sometimes he played Bach, or a pianist, whose fingers pressed deeper into the keys than others.    Other mornings:    National Public Radio.    A poet, a scientist, someone trying to say the impossible in ordinary words.    He liked the trying more than the saying.

He painted standing—rarely seated.    Some days he moved constantly between easel, sink, and mixing table.    Other days he barely moved at all.    Just watched.

Lunch was simple.    Bread.    Fruit.    A little cheese.    Sometimes eggs, lentils, soup across several days.    He didn’t eat out much—not out principle, but because it broke the thread.

If tired, he would lie on the couch at the back wall.    Twenty, thirty minutes.    No more.    And when he woke, the light had shifted again—slanted, softened, more forgiving.    The canvas looked changed.    As if it had waited for his absence.

Late afternoons were often the best.    A second wind, free of pressure.    There was a looseness in the air, born from knowing no one would knock or call.    He spoke to the work then—not aloud, but inwardly.    This tint?    Too warm.    This stroke?    Too sure.    Let it break.    Let it breathe.    Let it speak without saying.

Sometimes the medium resisted.    A brush faltered.    A gesture collapsed.    He didn’t fight.    He gave it space.    If he stayed patient, it found its rhythm again.

Not everything reached completion.    Some works remained open—not abandoned, simply finished enough.    Others came suddenly, like music that plays without lifting the fingers.

By evening, he cleaned his tools.    Never rushed.    He wiped the palette.    Rinsed the jars.    Hung the rags to dry.    It was a kind of thanks.    Not to the painting.    To the day.

Then lights out.    Door closed.    Nothing declared.    Nothing completed.    Yet something always moved forward.

Grief, too, remained.    It lived in the room like dust—settled in corners, clinging to stretchers still bare, woven into old white sheets.

His sister’s illness came slowly, then all at once—while Adagio in G Minor played low across the studio.    He painted through it.    Not to escape, but because stopping would have undone him.    In the silence between strokes, he could feel her breath weakening.    Sometimes he imagined she could see the work from wherever she was.    That each finished piece carried a word he hadn’t dared to say aloud.    She would have understood.    She always had.

Later, when his former lover died—alone, unexpectedly, in Berlin—he stopped painting altogether.    The studio felt still in a way he couldn’t enter.    Even the canvas turned away from him.    When he returned, it was with a muted palette.    Dry.    Indifferent.    The first brush stroke broke in two.    He left it.    And continued.

Desire, too, had quieted.    Not vanished.    Just softened.    In youth it had been urgent, irrepressible.    Now it hovered—an echo that came and went.    He didn’t shame it or perform it.    He lived beside it, the way one lives beside a field once burned, now slowly greening.

Grief didn’t interrupt the work.    It deepened it.    Not in theme—but in texture.    Some of those paintings seemed familiar to others.    But he knew what they held—the weight of holding steady while coming apart inside.

Even now, some colors recalled a bedside.    A winter walk.    The sound of someone no longer breathing.    A flat grey.    A blue once brilliant, now tempered between longing and restraint.

He wondered sometimes about that tension.

But when he painted, stillness returned.

Seventeen years ago, when chemotherapy ended, the days grew quieter.

There was no triumph. Just a slow return to rhythm—different now.    The body had changed.    So had the mind.    He couldn’t paint for hours without fatigue.    The gestures once fluid were heavier, more tentative.

He didn’t resist it.

The studio remained, but the center of gravity shifted.    Where once he reached for a brush, now he reached for a pen.    At first, just notes.    Fragments.    A way to hold the day together.    Then came sentences.    Paragraphs.    Not about himself, not directly.    About time.    Memory.    Presence.    Writing became a solace.    A way to shape what the body could no longer carry. A place to move, still, with care.

It wasn’t the end of painting.    Just a pause.    A migration.    Writing required its own attention, its own patience.    And he recognized in that a familiar devotion.

Sometimes, the canvas still called.    It would rest untouched for weeks.    Then one day, without announcement, he would begin again.

The two practices lived side by side.    Some days the brush.    Some days the page.    No hierarchy.    No regret.    Only the quiet persistence of a life still unfolding.

There is no final piece.    No last word.

He understands now:    a life is not made of things finished, but of gestures continued—marks made in good faith, even when no one is watching.    A sentence begun.    A color mixed.    A canvas turned to the wall—not in shame, but because it had said enough.

He no longer asks what comes next.    That question no longer troubles him.

If anything remains, it will not be the name, or the archive, or even the objects themselves.    It will be the integrity of attention—the way he returned, again and again, to meet the moment as it was.

Not to make something lasting.
But to live, briefly, in truth.

*

Ricardo F Morin Tortolero

Bala Cynwyd, Pa., June 14, 2025

Editor:    Billy Bussell Thompson

Author’s Note

This piece, like much of what I’ve made in recent years, exists because of those who have sustained me.

To David Lowenberger—whose love and steadfastness give my life its rhythm.    Without him, continuity itself would falter.

To José Luis Montero, my first art teacher, whose presence early on became a compass I’ve never stopped following.

To my parents, whose quiet influence shaped my regard for form, devotion, and care.

And always, to my friend and editor, Billy Bussell Thompson, whose voice lives quietly in mine.

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