Customer Reviews

Luis Caballero: Paintings and Drawings

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This book is richly illustrated with beautifully coloured reproductions of many of Caballero's paintings. Mostly they show the male, wounded, in a sort of ecstasy of pain. They are powerfully erotic, but in the distanced way that we see in Bernini's St. Theresa. Caballero, however, uses paint, not marble, so the paintings are hotter, more immediate. Edward Lucie Smith's essay, all too brief, convincingly sets Caballeros' work in the context of a brutal South American experience, and in world art generally. Caballeros' death from the results of AIDS adds a poignancy to this stangely moving book.

The paintings of Luis Caballero are now in the realm of shrines or altars to the plagues that merged as one in the form of AIDS in the 20th Century. These paintings and drawings are not grotesque: these works are packed with the immediacy of facing a finite life whether that terminal state is due to disease as in the artist's case or to other horrors such as wars, brutality, homophobia, random acts of violence. Caballero was a brilliant draughtsman and captured so much movement in his line that the figures, though languishing, still maintain a quality of constant movement. Edward Lucie-Smith adds his usually fine comments to this monograph. This is one collection of art that goes beyond just being art to being an homage to the artist's plight. And isn't that what great art is, afterall?