Painting: Surviving Insanity

by Arnaldo Roche
January 2004

This group of paintings lies within the development of ideas related to Brothers: Vincent - The Bridge Between My Brother and Me, created between 2002-2003 and exhibited at the Ponce Museum of Art, Puerto Rico.

After the events of September 11th, I was searching for a way to compose in painting the tortuous human process of renunciation and renewal. The documentation of destruction and tragedy can be done in thousands of ways. I realized that it would not be an easy task to convey in images the ways in which those affected by the same event manage to survive the tragedy. An unexpected death cannot be understood nor justified, which makes the process of recovery very difficult. We continue to live in pieces, reliving the tragedy between narratives of what was lost and the creation of fantasies of what might have been but was not.

What are the possibilities in our time for a painting that encloses what we so passionately desire? That dream that becomes our very identity. That margin of our reality that allows us to continue living and functioning normally. Those ideas that allow us to end the day like heroes. Why hasn't anyone painted the city of fear? A city whose inhabitants are forced to look upward, forced to look north to south and east to west to see if planes are falling from the sky once more. I cannot speak for the pain of a nation or the pain of a city. They have been rendered breathless, without words or images that could go beyond the mere anecdote of the tragedy. The greatest challenge that we contemporary artists face in the light of these events is not one of originality but of sincerity.

What if we make the canvas a lung through which to breathe? A place where memory can heal beyond devotional or commemorative images. A place where every tear is paid for with a tear and every pain with pain. The work I have done in recent years is about this. To begin, I propose my own story. Not to relive my pain but to understand "painting as a mechanism" that will make me float above my own shipwreck.

The History

Painting: Surviving Insanity signifies surviving the remembrance of the tragic events that surround my family. When he was about twenty-one years old, my now deceased brother Félix ended my sister Nancy's life by shooting her several times with my father's gun while she was asleep in bed. I was fourteen and was drawing at the dining table.

My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and between hospitalizations, he lived at intervals with us. Félix was highly paranoid which made his medication very difficult. During some of his relapses, he would return to the town of Vega Alta, where the fatal events took place, only to be brought back by family or friends. On one occasion, my brother did not return as he had done several times before. After six months of searching for him on radio and television, he was found in the countryside, dead due to dehydration and hunger.

The work I have done in the past years does not explore the problem of perception or the isolation these patients suffer. These images represent the acknowledgement of a still active past, a remembrance that forever shapes our identity.

In my painting, the subject of death or suicide was kept strictly hidden and rejected for over three decades. Anyone who has lived with a mental patient will understand my anxiety in the creation of these paintings. I am not trying to identify who is good or evil. Neither do I want to confront life or demand anything of God. Among other things, I want to narrate the encounter between characters that remind me how important it is to be alive, and Vincent Van Gogh has been a perfect means for this purpose.

I paint grief without reclaiming the creative freedom of the subconscious or independence from the fundamental elements of painting. I see myself as a spirit that seeks manifestation in matter. The intoxicated person who wants to say something in the best possible way. The visionary who, inside his own cave, realizes that no matter how dark or intense the images may seem, they are part of the process of finding the light. That is why my pain is full of color. And my scratches are not those of a cat who has fallen into the water but those of the lion who reclaims the domain of his territory.

In the Beginning

In Chicago, during the years 1980-1982, after discovering I suffered from a sugar imbalance, it became necessary for me to scratch on paper to create a series of self-portraits that would make me feel "real". One of them would be Scraping the Spirit of Flesh, mixed medium on paper, in 1980.

After completing these self-portraits and under a new nutritional regime, I made the decision to break away from the past and from all the pain that was striving to keep me from developing as an individual. I started by tearing up photos and mementos of every type. I simply decided not to save or to collect anything, not even art. I had to give the renovated Roche space. At that moment I decided to abandon my self-portraits to be able to begin the emotional process of recognizing everyone else. This need culminated with a complicated technique in which the model poses under the loose canvas, which is spread out like a sheet, and his shape is traced on the other side, previously painted with layers of oil paint. I no longer had to look toward the past. I was able to identify the child in me, who took pleasure in the physical and psychological aspect of my technique. Painting became an exercise in discovery. I was able to unify engraving techniques and sculpting principles on canvas. Oil painting became a sacred medium.

The Return

The visual world created by Vincent works as a structure for this approach to what has been lost. My brother was everything to which I wanted to get close. It was Félix who generated in me all curiosity. During those fourteen years my brother was the "great mirror", not my father. Both Félix and Vincent were demolished by insanity. They both committed suicidal acts in the countryside.

A great deal of our thinking borders on the fabrication of the absurd, of the impossible. It is necessary to keep in mind that in this story there are no scripts or parallelisms to closely follow. There are no letters and I am not Theo. These images talk about encounters that are totally unreal, fabricated. My brother's real face does not appear in any of the paintings. The bodies are traced copies of my assistants' onto which Vincent's face or mine has been inserted.

We all have our secrets as to how we manage to survive. We interact among ourselves trying to find those individuals and signs that will complete our scheme for survival. When I find mine, they end up under the canvas transformed into paintings, to remind myself that I am still alive, that I have had to accept that pain is a part of me, that memory is deceptive, that painting for others would be more convenient than painting for myself. My desire to live hurls me once again before the mirror of my own image, forcing me to complete a puzzle.