A MISSION I OWE TO MY FAMILY

Micah Carpentier spent the better part of his life "groping after meaning," or so I was told my old aunt Gisella. My aunt claims that she knew the great Cuban artist quite intimately, especially during the last decade of his life. This is a remarkable claim since as a family we are not particularly close seeing as history, calamity and subsequent migration have dispersed our clan into the farthest tributaries of the planet.

Micah Carpentier, 1964. Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City

The Cuban Carpentiers were originally from L'viv having emigrated well before the Soviets, with characteristic amnesia, snatched the city from the Poles and renamed it Lvov. Upon arriving in Latin America the family quickly rechristened themselves as Catholics and discarded their racially tainted cognomen (Mandelbrojt) for something they considered more neutral. That the Carpentiers exchanged one form of tragedy for another was a cruel irony that was rarely, if ever, discussed openly.

"We appear to possess a rare talent for violent death," my aunt Gisella once quipped while we sat together in her sun-drenched Caracas flat sipping strong Persian coffee and nibbling on her delicious pastelitos de guayaba. "I won't say Micah had it coming, but destiny is destiny and aché is aché." Gisella was fond of using the lexicon of Santería which she typically empowered to explain just about everything, both good and bad.  

And in fact upon looking back, the common thread of Micah Carpentier's oeuvre seems to be that of mortality. There is a gloomy, bereaved quality that hovers over the fugitive materials used in The Song of Degrees, Carpentier's capacious series of drawings on discarded paper bags. 

Details from The Song of Degrees, 1962 - 1973. Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City

Likewise the hauntingly obsessive Enteros Nómadas, a rough grid of integers crudely drawn on a 40 foot long sheet of laminated fiberglass.

detail from Enteros Nómadas, Courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Foundation, Mexico City

Poder Terrenal está Poseído por los Verdugos, another emblematic work whose chief virtue lies in its menacing title,  was famously described by the historian Orestia Shestov as "a fatalistic ballad of bleating pessimism and vanquished faith." Very loosely based on the bizzarre and defensive musings of 17th century mystic Jacopo di Candia, Carpentier tried to connect what he saw as the "universal death-wish"( la pulsión de muerte) common to music, painting and metaphysics.

Poder Terrenal está Poseído por los Verdugos, Micah Carpentier, 1971.

 Most would agree that the work, though highly ambitious, comically falls flat.

I have been spending the past two years researching the life and work of this singular artist. His short-lived marriage to my grandmother's half-sister makes our familial connection too convoluted to affix a stable term. This by no means diminishes the very real and visceral kinship that draws me toward him.

I am grateful to the Micah Carpentier Foundation in Mexico City for having made their archive available to me. I am especially indebted to Isak Chuetas, principle librarian of the archive for his tireless help, guidance and inspiration.