| When Fidel Lino Cataldi paints in the meantime he reads the book he is in love with. It is the
book of the Imaginary Creatures that Borges told Margarita Guerrero and that she reported into
that sweet and rich language Fidel masters since his childhood. Unknown and disturbing creatures
spring out of those pages generated by nightmares, broken visions caught by blind eyes in dark
flashings: ashy outlines , broken flights, filaments made of gauze and hair. These ghosts go through
the artist’s paintings and his resolute paintbrush moves to bury the blind white of the canvas
under whirls, knots and the weight of quivering colours. A sudden excitement of life is generated
by this threat of destruction. Sometimes lots of brush-strokes unwisely delete and exhaust one
another , showing at last the lofty original empty space. Then with their ethereal flight they keep
chasing just like shapeless shapes recalling us of the beginning and the end of the world. It is
neither the terrific explosion of light of Turner’s paintings, nor the metaphysical flying creatures
of Blake’s – two great painters Fidel Lino always bears in mind - an acquired familiarity and
a still unknown perturbation beyond the human, and yet revealed through nightly rides of
death , lacteous dawns of entangling horror , green and blackish horizons in a slow decay or
even stagnant ponds of red and blue. Sometimes it seems that from that folding up into itself of
the matter, of the light in the empty space, of the maturity in childhood, a secret promise of new
angel-like human beings flying over white worlds still speechless and dreamless is generated. It is
a whole dreamt up painting of those imaginary Creatures Borges told Margarita and Margarita
reported to the fantasy of a child who is lit up with fear and desire. |
