Carlos Montemayor
The Blue Country by Fermín Gutiérrez
The recurrence of the Blue universe in the work of Fermín Gutiérrez constitutes one of the most profound references of his evolution and plastic creation. I do not propose that certain paintings, numerous and diverse, related or select, constitute a thematically or discursively closed cycle; nor do they conform to a specific era. Blue and the various shades and textures of this color have been important in periods or plastic perspectives in the mosaics of Babylonian palaces or in the mosques of the 15th and 16th centuries in India, for example; in the sumptuous background of the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel, in certain paintings by Cézanne or Van Gogh, in the blue period of Picasso or in the Mexican landscape of Velasco, to name other dissimilar and contrasting cases.
For this reason we could say that in Fermín Gutiérrez the succession of the plastic universe of Blue is also a complex and increasingly enriching path towards his own art and towards himself, both in the paintings where the shades of blue fade or are accentuated, as in spaces where it retreats or concentrates on a point in the painting inhabited by other contrasting colors, vivid or on fire, as occurs in “The Vast Night”, in “Women Looking at the Sky”, in “The Comet” or even in “Penumbra”. . The “Ascent of Blue towards its own depth” is a process of creation, learning, training, research, discovery of the world and the order of color as the origin of the atmosphere, space, contours or silence and the irruption of voices that extend cotton threads in opposite or coincident directions; in colors, tones, objects or human images that seem about to fade or barely rest from the very moment of their initial appearance or “materialization”.
In this deepening of color they learn to experience all the colors, they learn to detach from themselves, in themselves, the images, the environments, the textures, the stories, the dreams, the fleeting or recurring visions that come to them from other possible worlds. The brushes of Fermín Gutiérrez. This is what happens in spaces like “Nocturnal Bird Hunters” or “The Hollow Shadow,” where certain colors only appear as a sliver of light or a glimpse of dawn. In that moment of the dawn of life, of beings, of the colors that surround life and transmit it veiled, mysteriously, from there, from that art, all the things that have the color that Fermín Gutiérrez arrive through our astonishment. . allows to appear or that only discovers in them, as being them: things in search of their own origin. Each silhouette, each figure, contains the breath to call, from the Blue Country, from the southern Parral to the northern Parral, like a morning and evening star, to call more strongly to its origin, to our origin.
