
Myriam Cuneo captures humor,
human psychology on the canvas
If laughter is the food of the Gods,
read on.
If love goes out
and comes back in a circle,
read on.
If laughter brings some light into the world, Myriam Cuneo's paintings shine light
into some of the shy corners of the human mind. If love forms a circle, then you will see Myriam Cuneo's art as a mirror.
"When people look at my paintings the first thing they do is to laugh,"
says Ms. Cuneo, some of whose delightful acrylic and collage figures float, charm and make merry. Behind all the fishes flitting about her human forms, and a forest of smiling giraffes, exists a healthy dose of self-perceptive medicine for the viewer.
And there is music when she paints. In her acrylic "Candombe" -- a red and buoyant work with joyous dancers floating before us -- "we see they represent African American (candombe) dancing," she says. Candombe is African American Uruguayan music with a particular sound for the carnival festival.
"The African Americans who live in Uruguay," says Ms. Cuneo, "brought across the ocean, in their minds, the sound of their past with tom-toms and with percussion. It was in their minds. They didn't bring a diskette or recording. They brought with them and for centuries they kept it in their minds. When they go to the street they reproduce the percussion sound -- generation after generation -- and I think this is an invaluable cultural richness that I can find and I like to paint that. I like to paint the music. They feel like they are flying to the music."
Witness the joy. A happy mother fish with babies swims around in a bubbly swirl of camouflage. Fashionable fish flit through many of her paintings.
"I like fish. They move like in a ballet but in a different medium. The liquid -- the water -- it's very sensual."
A mythical bird basks in more hues and shades than Joseph's coat of many colors and seems to represent the full range of emotion in her native continent. A painting of a meek mouse is a rainbow of color.
Then, witness the people who somehow need a helping hand in their muffled attempt to be human. A cagey businessman wants to say "shake my hand." Another man sends a bluff political statement about people too wrapped up with their own lives -- the "formal pig" -- a collage of melancholy intangibles that we may see in ourselves when we are not our real selves.
Perhaps this sense of humor is sharpened by Ms. Cuneo's experiences in Latin America (her home is Montevideo), Europe and Israel. She speaks Spanish, French, Italian, English and Hebrew, and knows enough Portuguese to get around, too. She laughs in many languages.
"I don't know why people are laughing at my paintings,"
says Ms. Cuneo, a graduate of the only public university in Uruguay where one of her art teachers shrugged that he had nothing more to teach her.
Out of the high cultural setting of Montevideo, dubbed by the erudite "the Paris of Latin America," Myriam Cuneo came to the United States with some of her work. She is her own artist, but represents a renaissance of female artists in her native land, now free of its hated dictatorship and still finding its way back into truer modes of speaking.
"I make the people laugh about the reality of themselves and I think its very healthy. It's like a demystification like taking off the tie and the high heels," she says. "I believe in freedom. They are people They have souls but the souls are hiding from view. If they knew how to deconstruct ... if they only knew how to be less formal and let the inner child come to the surface."
What is her genre? Don't look for representational art in her collection. Look for homage to artists who deal in the intangibles and the imagination. Kafka. Chagall. She calls it "figurative expressionism." Her figures
"go wherever they please. That's why they fly. I don't know genre. I think my art is universal, not just Latin American. I'm not 'just Latin American.' This is a cliché. Latin American art doesn't exist Perhaps Torres Garcia is Latin American. He was Uruguayan but he is very much a part of European constructivism."
Ms. Cuneo believes the United States "is the land of opportunity" and
"I believe New York represents today what Paris was in the 1800s. Because it's blooming."
And the music in her work?
"I think about percussion when I paint. I don't know the names of the instruments in English -- but they include drums, piano, organ, the violin. They're also Hasidic music -- Eastern European Hasidic music. Because I'm Jewish, I am interested in the clarinet, the violin. Klezmer music makes me cry because I feel I belong to that."
Happiness evolves from sadness.
"I think when I am sad I paint a happy picture because I want to escape," says Ms. Cuneo. Her dolphins are making love. They go around in circles -- "because you nurture the person you love and the person who loves you nurtures you."
Myriam Cuneo believes, at 55, that she is reaching the height of her artistic strength. She wants to make a mark in the world, but how long can an artist wait to be discovered?
"Five years -- I have a lot of patience," she laughs.
She has put her pictures on internet and is beginning to get responses from around the world.
"The internet is somewhere there in the cosmos. I learned something about the cosmos through reading Carl Sagan (the late astrophysicist) and I have the big hope someone will see them (the pictures) and say: Eureka! Here is the person I want to buy!"
With such a wide range of subject matter, how does she decide what to paint?
"I never know. Sometimes I feel like I am in the dark. But I think the empty page sometimes is like a panic. When you start moving your hand around, the page gives you answers. I don't know from where it's coming from -- perhaps the page itself. When I have accomplished a creation I feel like I made love to the painting. And there is something born from this act."
Enjoy our exhibit! If you want to see more paintings by Myriam Cuneo, view them at her gallery, where you can order them as well.
Copyright for all images: Myriam Cuneo
All text contributions by Michael E. Abrams Tallahassee, Florida,
phone (904) 386-2310
Exhibit design: Gerd Marstedt (The Fine Site)
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