Mirages of the Caribbean

Fernando Birri used the term fotoglifos [photoglyphs] to refer to the largest body of his painted work. Traces of this word can be found as early as the 1970s, but Birri embraced it more fully during his years in the Caribbean—from his time in Mérida, Venezuela, where he founded the Laboratorio Ambulante de Poéticas Cinematográficas, to Cuba, where he co-founded the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV). Reflecting on its origin, Birri noted:

The basic intuition is this: since the earliest times, from the Neolithic cave era, man has attempted to communicate his vision of the world, to decipher the scientific and religious mystery that life hides beneath the appearance of the forms in which it manifests, its ultimate meaning. Thus, with a sharpened bone or a stone dagger, he engraved on other stones—of caves, of mountains, or of rivers—images of animals, of other men and women who hunt, dance, and join in copulation, of suns, moons, and stars. These representations, as mimesis (imitation) of what is seen or ritual conjuring of what is feared or invoked (death, a good hunt, rain), are the ‘petroglyphs’ (etymologically ‘stone signs.’).

As a contemporary artist, the passage of time and civilizations has placed a new expressive material at my disposal: light (in the magic lantern, cinema, television). Making a leap in history, I try to express that ancient mystery, still without a definitive answer, through signs and paintings that I conceive and create to be projected with a beam of light—ephemeral images made of light—these are the ‘photoglyphs’ (etymologically ‘signs of light’). ¹