Like almost all abstract art, the Cuban’s work is at the same time mystical, physical and philosophical.
1ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, 15 February 2025 — After the death of Waldo Balart in Madrid, his little book ’Essays on Art’ began to circulate again, published in 1993 by Betania. A man of many lives, all of them hectic, it was logical that he asked for euthanasia as the only way to stop what seemed to be the beginning of his immortality. A drinking buddy of Pollock and Warhol, he had left Cuba carrying a surname comparable only in historical tension to the surname Castro.
Like almost all abstract art, Waldo Balart’s work is simultaneously mystical, physical and philosophical. His need to explain his paintings – sometimes through convoluted “propositions,” in the manner of Euclid – reveals how much of them are meditative. Purifying the spirit before holding a brush, illuminating oneself before the canvas, breathing, contemplating, classifying, creating.
The search for this alternative mystical meaning – neither Christianity nor yoga could give him everything he was looking for – led him to the physics of color and to the multiple and malleable idea of the fourth dimension. From Einstein, Waldo Balart learned that time can be a substance, and that as a substance it can be represented. “Time heals everything,” he said. And also: “Time worries me.” And also: “Over the years I realize that time with me is wear and tear.”
From Einstein Waldo Balart learned that time can be a substance, and that as a substance it can be represented
In the oppressive Victorian society where the popular – but not physical – concept of the fourth dimension was born, the idea that there are worlds that our senses cannot grasp was a symbol of freedom. Flatland , a mathematical novel published in 1884 by Edwin Abbott, narrated the adventures of a square who discovers the existence of spheres.
In “flatland” there are only two-dimensional forms, and the appearance of this other being upsets everything. The sphere, on the other hand, does not conceive the possibility of a fourth, a fifth or an nth dimension. The idea was so attractive that it won thousands of followers, such as the bigamist writer Charles Hinton, who invented the tesseract – a hypercube with 24 faces and 32 edges, later painted by Dalí – and the theosophist Claude Bragdon, who aspired to redecorate New York following magical and numerical patterns.
For Waldo Balart, only abstraction – specifically Suprematism and Constructivism – had succeeded, after several failed attempts, in representing these new conceptions of time and space. This required a great deal of inner purification, similar to that of a saint or a hermit.
Pure color, pure form, mathematics and illumination together. A song to freedom that never ceases to have a profound resonance in history.
The Cuban’s affinity with these movements led him to shape his work according to the same search for purity. Pure color, pure form, mathematics and illumination together. A song to freedom that never ceases to have a deep resonance in history – and in his own history – a rebellion against politics and reality that seems to reach its climax in the photo that Rialta published in 2024 of his empty wheelchair. Clean lines, a scarf, paint stains on the floor, the absent body. It is the Heart Sutra of Buddhism: emptiness is form, form is emptiness.
“The needs for freedom and solidarity are born from an internal struggle within the creator,” writes Waldo Balart, “which drives him to become self-absorbed and thus be able to channel his energy from a personal perspective.” This idea is expressed much more clearly in his letter to the poet Gonzalo Rojas, where the painter claims to have succeeded in translating onto canvas the feeling of emptiness of Saint John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic.
The perfect representation of the dispossesion was a black square like Kubrick’s – “it can’t be a circle, because then it would be a black hole” – because it was at the same time the absence of color and all colors, delimited by a solid form. “I consider it as nothingness, which is the only way to achieve communion with the Universe.”
‘Essays on Art‘ does not contain only essays on art. Waldo Balart foresaw the pressure of the Internet as early as 1987, when he attended an exhibition by the technological giant IBM in the Egyptian temple of Debod, transplanted in Madrid. He was shown the making of a chip and the future of computing. The situation was like walking through a labyrinth with an unlikely tour guide: the Minotaur. The artist saw in all this a danger for those who wish to lead “a marginal existence as the last bastion of personal freedom.” A prophecy fulfilled.
One of the most delicious texts in the anthology is ’Revolution’, the “outline of a history of the Cuban tribe, descendants of the Goths and the Lucumíes”
One of the most delicious texts in the anthology is ’Revolution’, the “outline of a history of the Cuban tribe, descendants of the Goths and the Lucumíes.” This comedy, which begins in 1492 and goes through the wars of independence and the Revolution of 1930 until reaching 1959, is his particular reading of the island’s past.
With Castro – his former-brother-in-law – a Russian flag is placed on the stage and “all the actors get into geometric-military formations, and begin to march like automatons repeating slogans in unison that the judges have ordered them: “blah burun gru puraca achán.” Waldo Balart senses the Cuban apocalypse, and after a season of “fights, killings and hangings” comes the great dispossession of all symbols. Only emptiness and a song by The Beatles remain.
What I like about Waldo Balart is not only his paintings, always with beautiful titles – Structure of Light, Axiomatic Orde, Longitudinal Knot Genesi, Proposition – but also that essential Cubanness that Castroism has always wanted to exterminate. The Island as a synthesis of the universal, as the zero coordinate to search for the rest of the universe. The Island, not as a closed-off state, but as a starting point.
The artist knew himself to be the custodian of this memory, which had “considerable weight” for him. That is why he liked to point out that the Revolution was only an accident – with all the implications of that word – in a larger story. “Everything has been said,” he insisted with Gide, “but since no one listens, it must be repeated.”
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