English
The year 1960 was one of great enthusiasm, work, optimism, and shared coexistence with my close colleagues. […] In the month of November I exhibited in two rooms at Galería Van Riel. It was functioning in the same location on Florida Street where the Asociación Amigos del Arte used to carry out their activities at the time when my father was organizing them. The size of the large spaces in this antique-style gallery permitted me to show what my new studio was making possible: large scale works. It was then that I understood that what Valéry had said was true, at least for me: “The painter paints with his body”.
When I painted in large formats, the explosive timid person was liberated from the prison of his “I”. This is also why I began to understand what Rimbaud had meant when he said “I is another” “I is another”. And it was entertaining to me to meet that other. I called myself an expressionist when I began to feel that it was, in any case, all about expression, but not that of the I (from which I freed myself), but that of the other, who began to be and who I was meeting in the act of painting.
Account by Luis Felipe Noé included in the book “Mi viaje-Cuaderno de bitácora” (My Voyage – Logbook, 2014).
[...] I paint in the way that I am and my relationship with the canvas is a human relationship like any other. Since you know me, this alone should be enough for you. You know my timid side, which explodes with the force of all that has been pent up inside once trust has been gained […] Given that I use figures my painting is figurative, and it is simultaneously abstract because in my paintings you can barely tell that they exist. Joking aside, abstraction is my method: I toss the paint on, the pictorial event takes place immediately on the virgin canvas, a world full of suggestion is created that works on me like a stain on a wall does on a child’s sensitivity […] I do not believe that figurative work and abstraction are concepts in opposition because it is erroneous to convert abstraction into a synonym of non-figurative. I do not want the word abstract in me to mean being detached from the world; I would prefer the meaning of this denomination to be equivalent to that of essentialization (and in this case there is no abstraction that does not have some point of departure). It is precisely—and with this I do not pretend to be a philosopher—in their essence, there where things are defined, that things merge and lose their boundaries. I am interested in conquering this for my work, even though they call it confusing, chaotic, with a double commitment or a lack of structure or being too literary […] My friend, poet Jorge Calvetti has told me that I am a realist of the world as it is not […] In the relationship, my painting is at the center, that is, where things are and cease to be. I don’t want to paint Joe Shmoe or Joe Smith but the relationship between the two or between one of them and things […] [this is the reason why I then showed a painting titled Amantes en acción (Lovers in Action)] […] I do figurative work with an abstract informal method, but that doesn’t make me an informalist […] I am interested in the world of appearance, the extraction of forms from the informal […] For these reasons I believe I am as abstract as I am figurative and that any of these labels (neo-expressionist, neo-figurative, post-informalist or perhaps, the most adequate on account of the terminology’s independence, the “new image of man”, already being used in the United States to refer to painting that is related to the sort that I do) can suit my work, since in the end they all mean the same thing: vitalist language for anthropomorphic painting.
If it weren’t too pedantic of an expression, I would definitely speak of a “new image of man’s reality” to understand the object of my painting […]