Baruj Salinas

Baruj Salinas (born July 6, 1935) is a Cuban-American contemporary visual artist and architect. He is recognized as a central figure in the establishment of the modern Latin American art market in South Florida.

Background

Salinas' family is of Sephardic Jewish origins. His ancestors came from a small salt mining town in northern Spain and they derive their name from these origins with "sal" meaning salt in Spanish. They resettled to Silibria, Turkey, another small town, following the 1492 expulsion of the Jews in Spain. They remained in Turkey until the Greco-Turkish Wars of the early 20th century, after which they emigrated first to Marseilles, France in 1918 and then to Cuba in 1920, within the area of Old Havana, which had a substantial Jewish community.

Early life

Upbringing in Cuba

Salinas was born in Havana, Cuba on July 6, 1935. He began painting early in life and was influenced and supported in the arts by his mother. Regina was a painter whose work consisted of still life scenes of flowers as her main subject in oil paint. This was Salinas’ first exposure to art and by the age of six he began to assist with his mother's painting. Salinas would also draw and sketch, such as tracing newspaper comics. His early sketches included Tarzan, Dick Tracy, and Superman.

By age eleven, Salinas had begun painting landscapes based on his observations of scenery in Cuba. This was followed by scenes of life and people in Havana such as fish salesmen, ice cream salesmen, and children on buses. These evolved into busier market scenes that he would sketch in person and apply paint to afterwards. His early works were made in his childhood bedroom as he did not have a studio at the time and he first exhibited his works at his school. At fourteen, he attended the Círculo de Bellas Artes behind the National Capitol Building in Havana and was the only teenager in attendance, surrounded by older professional painters.

Kent State and architecture

His mother encouraged his progression as a self-taught artist and he continued developing in this way (“unrestrained”) until he received a scholarship to study painting in Kent State University. Upon attending, he felt socio-economically excluded from the fine art world due to his background, though he remained strongly dedicated to design. Therefore, he followed in his father's footsteps and switched his major to architecture, continuing to paint as a personal hobby and minor income source.

While in America, he had begun painting portraits to supplement his income. His subjects were largely his friends and their family and they continued in his early realist vein. Salinas later admitted that in these commissions he would idealize his subject's likeness for a more flattering representation and overall did not enjoy painting portraits. In his personal painting, however, his style had begun to evolve away from realism and representational imagery as his architecture studies impacted him creatively. During this period he became exposed to the Abstract Expressionist movement, which would influence his later art. He began to explore facades and structures and gradually dabble into abstraction, which would become his most identifiable style later in his career. He began by depicting buildings around him in America and eventually delved into depicting imagined buildings, which would take him further into three dimensional representation and the conceptual.

After he received his degree in architecture from Kent State in 1958, Salinas pursued architecture professionally in different cities, identifying as a Modernist, while also continuing to paint and exhibit his work. For the remainder of the decade he would work as an architect while residing in Mexico City (1957–59) and San Antonio, Texas (1959–61). In 1959 he participated in an exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. In 1960 he exhibited at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Havana as well as the Witte Museum in San Antonio and was well received. During this period of the early 1960s Salinas began winning awards for his art and also began feeling restrained by the rigidity and form of architecture. This combination led him to stray from architecture and embrace the arts more directly, a process that would continue into the 1960s.

Art career

First Miami period

Having emigrated from Cuba in 1959, Salinas joined the Cuban diaspora in exile as a result of Fidel Castro's rise to power in the Cuban Revolution, joining them in Miami after his stays in Mexico City and San Antonio. Once in Miami, he first mainly worked professionally as an architect to sustain himself but also continued to paint. Salinas had the advantage of being already fluent in English by that point, but still struggled economically as most early exiles had, particularly in the arts. By 1963-64 he was selling his works for as little as $25 (about $200 in 2020, adjusted for inflation), during the period well before the establishment of an organized market for Cuban art in South Florida. As a result, even those relatively low rates were often paid in installments, such as five dollars a week or month. Some buyers were previous collectors of Cuban art in Cuba looking to restart their collection after losing their paintings to the Castro regime. Others were new collectors.

Throughout the 1960s Salinas was increasingly active in exhibiting his painting in art venues throughout the United States (Florida, Texas, Missouri) as well as internationally in Mexico and Guatemala. His artwork continued his self-imposed evolution away from architectural influences and saw him directly embrace abstraction for the first time. He drew inspiration from the Space Race and Apollo XIII and painted pieces inspired by outer space and astronomy, such as nebulas and constellations.

Salinas was also increasingly active in the Cuban and Latin American art market in Miami. A significant development came in the mid-1960s when Salinas co-founded (with Enrique Riveron) and subsequently led the Grupo GALA (an acronym for ''Grupo de Artistas Latino Americanos''), the first formal professional organization of Latin American artists established is South Florida. GALA members (Salinas, Enrique Riveron, Rafael Soriano, José María Mijares, Roxanna McAllister, and Osvaldo Gutiérrez) would gather bi-monthly to discuss their individual art projects, sponsorships, and organize bi-annual group exhibitions.

Through most of the 1960s, while he continued to deepen his commitment to art, Salinas still worked in architecture as his main profession. This would change by the turn of the decade as he received increasing recognition for his art. In 1968, Salinas won a First Prize award for Watercolor from the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. In 1969 he received the Cintas Fellowship for art and then for a second time in 1970, which Salinas has credited in interviews with giving him the initiative to ultimately quit architecture as his main profession and fully dedicate himself to fine art in the 1970s. In 1971, Salinas had a solo exhibition in Washington D.C. at the B.I.D. Gallery.

During this period Salinas was neighbors with fellow prominent Cuban artist Juan Gonzalez and taught him the airbrush painting technique González used to achieve the large-scale hyperrealism style that would soon gain him recognition by leading art institutions in following decade. Salinas also introduced González to Jesus and Marta Permuy, in 1969. This facilitated the launch of Permuy Gallery in 1972 as Gonzalez relocated permanently to New York City and the Permuys assumed the lease to González's Coral Gables art studio and converted it into one of the first Cuban art galleries in the United States. Salinas and the individual Grupo GALA members would be active participants in the gallery's activities as well as in other early Latin American art events and activities, which contributed to the gradual growth of that market in the region during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Spanish period

In 1974, Salinas relocated from Miami to Barcelona, Spain where he would remain for the following two decades. The move signaled the end of the GALA group and a new phase of Salinas’ career. In Spain, Salinas became associated with leading art dealer Juana Mordó, who was an essential contact for Salinas and opened her vast network to him within Madrid and Barcelona. This critical exposure helped him become established in Spain and develop a regular stream of collectors there. Salinas also became associated with prominent Spanish painters, including Joan Miró, Antoní Tàpies, as well as American Alexander Calder. He also became immersed in Spain's literary community and developed close friendships with several writers including María Zambrano, José Angel Valente, Vahe Godel, Ramon Dachs, Pere Gimferrer, and Michel Butor.

This period saw Salinas venture further into total abstraction and free form styles. It also saw his color palette shift toward more subtle and neutral tones with a strong emphasis on whites and grays, often inspired by and symbolizing clouds. Salinas would call this concept “The Language of the Clouds,” which became a series of works exploring this color palette and approach to abstraction.
During his Spain period, Salinas would also explore the pictographs of China and Japan as well as foreign alphabets including Greek, Iberian, and Hebrew. These alphabets reflected the influence of the writers he was exposed to and his interest in reducing patterns to fundamentals and abstracting them with his palette of white, which he associated with purity and cleanliness, particularly in the context of its prevalence in Barcelona.

Collaborations

Collaborations were a significant mark of this phase of Salinas’ career, particularly interdisciplinary collaborations, and several won awards.

In the 1980s, Salinas actively worked with several writers, particularly poets. In 1980 Salinas partnered with José Ángel Valente on ''Tres lecciones de Tinieblas'' (''Three Lessons of Darkness''), a book inspired by the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah and utilized fourteen Hebrew letters along with Valente's poetic interpretation of each. The first letter (Aleph) was called "first blood", while "Beth" corresponded with the concept of home or dwelling. The book won Spain's National Prize of Poetry for its year.

He also did two books with María Zambrano, one of which, ''Antes de la ocultación: los mares'' (1983), was noteworthy for its four lithographs by Salinas that involved a complex double process: the first being the lithographic process while the second was the incorporation of texture into the book. The pair had a long-running collaboration that would grow to include a second book, ''Arbol'' (Tree), in 1985 as well as a number of other projects through editor and gallerist Orlando Blanco. In 1988 Salinas worked with Michel Butor on the book ''Trois enfants dans la fournaise.'' The book featured etchings by Salinas and accompanying poetry by Butor and was shown in the Museum of Bayeux in France.

Salinas also established long-running creative relationships with Barcelona printmakers and artists. One was Rufino Tamayo, who specialized in lithographs and engravings. He also worked with Japanese artist and printmaker Masafumi Yamamoto for 15 years, during which time Salinas refined his own printmaking processes. The collaboration would also impact the development of his paintings as he would factor in more closely the etching and printmaking process that would follow in replicating his artworks. A poet associate of Salinas at the time described this influence as his being “yamamotisized,” and Salinas would in turn influence Yamamoto's work while in Barcelona.

Second Miami period and later career

Salinas returned to Miami in 1992 and would reside in Coral Gables, Florida. Since returning to the United States, he has exhibited in New York City, Chicago, Spain, France, Switzerland, Japan, Egypt, Panama, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

His style since his second Miami period has seen Salinas gradually re-embrace color. He attributed the widening of his color palette and increased use of contrast and saturation to the difference in light between Spain and Miami, as well as the cultural differences between how each city uses color. Upon his return to the United States in 1992, Salinas also met his second wife Marilyn C. Fonts, who was then employed in a South Florida fine art gallery; the couple would wed in 2004.

From 1993 to 1998, and again in 2000 and 2002–03, Salinas served as the Arts Coordinator for the International Committee for Human Rights in Miami. He is currently a fine art professor at Miami Dade College and began teaching in the MDC Interamerican campus in 2001. In that role, he has been active in curating and facilitating student exhibitions of art there.

From 2015 to 2017 Salinas was recruited to be part of The Torah Project which was then compiled in the book ''The Torah Project Humash.'' The book featured 27 images of his work. The book was presented in 2017 to Pope Francis at a ceremony in the Vatican with Salinas in attendance.

Style

Salinas’ artwork and architecture design have their foundation in mid-century movements which he has interpreted and updated with a number of personal influences and themes. As an architect, Salinas is part of the Modernist tradition and before his retirement had prominently utilized concrete-heavy designs that drew influence from Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Le Corbusier, and Erich Mendelsohn. Architecture had also influenced his early art.

Salinas’ art is noted for its spiritual, philosophical, cultural, and symbolic layerings. He is identified with the Abstract Expressionism movement, Artmajeur having first been exposed to the work of its leading members ( Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Zao Wou-Ki) while at Kent State University. Salinas has occasionally taken to forays of figurative and representational abstraction. His various artistic periods are generally marked by gradual rather than radical style shifts, often incorporating many degrees of subtlety. His art is also noted for its collaborative nature and the occasional influence of other artists. Salinas described abstract painters Albert Rafols Casamada and Tàpies as influences on his work in Barcelona and also considered Miró a mentor while maintaining that they each had differing styles and approaches.

A core theme of Salinas' body of artwork has been the exploration of personal identity and the various cultural identities he embraces. One is his Cuban identity and he is considered part of the original wave of the ''La Vieja Guardia'' (the Old Guard) generation of Cuban artists that followed the Vanguardia movement in Cuba. His “Penca de Palma Triste” (Leaf of a Sad Palm) series of the late 1980s expressed his Cuban identity in exile as Salinas depicts a single leaf of a palm tree, a longtime quintessential symbol of Cuba, as symbolic of a piece removed from the whole, while also using his abstract method to create ambiguous images that can also be interpreted as waterfalls or the tail feathers of an exotic bird. Salinas also described color is a key acknowledgment of his Cuban identity.

Another identity he explores is his Jewish heritage. His expression of Jewish identity are seen in his themes and concepts of solitude, individuality, movement (diaspora), as well as his exploration of Jewish mysticism through the Kabbalah. Key Jewish-inspired series' of Salinas work include his award-winning collaboration with José Angel Valente, ''Tres Lecciones de Tinieblas,'' as well as his paintings for the Torah Project in 2015.

In regards to his interpretation of the cross-cultural themes of globalism in Contemporary art, Salinas has stated "Art has become a universal language and the modern artist attempts to embrace the idea of a language that has no barriers."

In describing Salinas' style, art critic Carlos M. Luis stated: "Baruj uses color and all its intense chromatism as a channel or filter (in the manner of alchemists) to distill a world of a romantic nature, but of a Romanticism closer to Turner than to Corot. That which Novalis called 'the adoration of chaos' was based in his belief that 'the more impenetrable was the chaos, so much more splendid was the star that would come out of it'." Luis believes Salinas' early experiments with color and abstraction were in the general vein of Kandinsky and that Salinas later developed a style akin to the "calculated spontaneity of Zen brushwork." In her 2004 book ''Cuban American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity, and the Neo-Baroque,'' SUNY art historian Lynette Bosch wrote that technique and emotion are both central to Salinas' body of work, as well as the development of "an integral aesthetic language of gesture, color, form, space, and movement."

Speaking on his own approach to art, Salinas has said “I strive to find a language that people can recognize in me by the work and not by my signature.“ He elaborated: “To me, painting is not work. It is something that transcends labor ..like a meditation. I enjoy seeing a wide blank space being developed into something that has life.”

Gallery

File:Genesis Creation Baruj Salinas.jpg, GENESIS: CREATION (2014) by Baruj Salinas
File:Exodus Red Sea Baruj Salinas.jpg, EXODUS: RED SEA (2014) by Baruj Salinas
File:Leviticus The Law Baruj Salinas.jpg, LEVITICUS: THE LAW (2014) by Baruj Salinas

Exhibitions and publications

Salinas has had over 100 solo exhibitions of his artwork and has exhibited in over 20 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These include multiple exhibitions in Cuba, the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere.

Salinas has been covered by several media outlets, including ''Art Now'', ''Arte Al Día Internacional'' Magazine, ''Art in America'', '' Art News'', The Washington Post, ''The Miami Herald

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