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Ruperto Jay Matamoros: "I was born with a paintbrush in my hand."

Marta Rojas

"Ruperto Jay Matamoros is my name, at your service." We simply met like that. Yet one of Cuba's most venerated octogenarian artists paints in mystery and treasures his work privately.

"I consider myself a child of nature and I am addicted to the forest," says Matamoros, refuting critics' classification of him as a "primitive painter," something that doesn't bother him but that he considers a misunderstanding. In this case, the identifications made by schools or by critics are not important. Matamoros has produced enough good works that he can call himself whatever he wants. There are no lists that have excluded him for the past half century.

He is reluctant to be interviewed and he doesn't like his work to be photographed. He considers it piracy for his pieces to be reproduced in newspapers or for his work to be widely disseminated in magazines or videos without his express authorization. Even then, he looks for some justification to prevent an excess of publicity.

He dislikes having himself photographed too. The exceptions can be counted on one hand. Further, it seems that he is being torn apart when, after speaking at length about why, where, and how he created an oil painting it is "snatched away," in the best sense of the word. But he cannot hide his pride when he hears that some of his paintings appear in a famous museum or that a collector has them, or a friend has had one hanging on the wall for years. More than anything he wants them in the museums and galleries.

Some say these are the idiosyncrasies of an old man; but everything seems to indicate that Matamoros has always behaved this way.

He is an easterner, born in San Luis in the former province of Oriente, now a part of Santiago de Cuba province. To be more precise, he was born on a farm called La Mariana in a mountainous region that is known locally as "Los Alpes." He is the seventh son of a marriage that produced 12--he says so without being asked and immediately underscores:

"I came to Havana in 1936 to improve my situation, because in the provincial countryside I didn't have the opportunity to develop myself--but I was born with a paintbrush in my hand." The next year, in 1937, he presented his first Estudio Libre show, inaugurated by one of Cuba's best-known artists, Eduardo Abela. In that show Matamoros earned an honorable mention that determined his artistic life.

The painter goes on, "My father pressed palm fronds that he cut from the royal palm to cover the house where we lived or any other place, and when he went to place them on the walls, he found them all painted. I was the one who did it. I used the hair of pigs' tails for a paintbrush--we call those pigs machos--and for paint I used something that I concocted myself out of the ashes of a coal stove and extracted different colors from--for example, crushed avocado seeds, Indian reeds, madras and other fruits of the earth. I gathered red rust from the tubes that were used to drain resins from the ovens to make vegetable coal. With those materials and others I made yellow and blue little balls and all the other colors that I began to combine intuitively. I painted the palms and when my father saw them he said, 'Ruperto has been through here.'"

I found out all of this on my first visit to his home. He presented his conditions, in a friendly way, but began to narrate happily and in a didactic manner like an old professor, telling how each of his paintings hanging on the walls were painted, when they were painted, and what inspired them.

"I'll take photos of you. It's not about the paintings," I said. Maybe that surprised him. He didn't approve of or reject my decision, that's true, but he called his compañera to protect him from the stranger who had invaded his "natural preserve" which he defends from intrusions.

He wants to speak about a work that is in every sense inspired by himself. The canvas shows a black man, a sword, and a serpent.

"It is the representation of good and evil. The good symbolizes justice. I worked for the Ministry of Justice for many years and I defended a colleague in the union, for reasons I'm not going to go into. But, yes, that's me, myself, doing justice. That work signifies a person's rights.

"That work was in the Salón de Paisaje, a show we used to have here. It belongs to my series `the landscape woman.' The other one is Camino, delirio del autor (The Road, Author's Delirium)."

"Why that name?" I asked.

"Don't you see it? Look, it's shown in the water's reflection. The other one is Che constructor (Che the Builder)."

He remains silent while he observes but he does not wait for questions. He shows me some of his other works, like Mar Pacífico, a Cuban flower; Flamboyán, the red flowering tree that appears in many of Matamoros' paintings, and Tiempo antiguo (The Old Days). In Espejo en tus ojos (The Mirror in Your Eyes), the eyes of a woman on the canvas are a mirror that reflects another painting by the artist, although he considers it a whole.

"Look," he says, "the woman defends herself with the sword from the serpent's attack. You'll see it in many of my works."

High up on one of the room's three walls--the other is a window where a flood of light comes from the sea off the nearby Malecón--there is a rectangular piece that from every angle appears as if the figures represented watch us. We visited Matamoros a few days after the Holy Father John Paul II was in Cuba. Matamoros immediately clarifies:

"I painted it in 1952, it's the Last Supper, but it has eleven characters, I made Judas disappear." It is a truly wonderful work. "I'm not selling it," he says without being asked. We had imagined as much.

The tour continues in this mysterious gallery to which it is a true pleasure to be admitted.

Pointing to a painting, he points out "The Virgin Mary or the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, but look. She rises from deep in the blue sea and the coral of shallow waters can be seen, things from nature." He points to another picture: "That one is me. Then come El hombre y el madero (The Man and the Vessel), La ninfa de los mares (The Nymph of the Seas), with another of my sea inventions, the mermaid. La fuente de la vida (The Source of Life), the purest water comes from the spring."

Matamoros' language is as full of symbolism as are his paintings; indeed, the only truly "real" ones are the portrait El veterano (The Veteran), of his present wife's father, and that of his first wife, who died.

In the front of the apartment, there is a great vertical mural, so tall it could be a palm tree that reaches the height of a wall in the house. It is a Cuban landscape, in his unique style. Even though it always faces the light, it holds its color.

"I prepare my canvases myself and continue to prepare the paints even though they are not the same as at the beginning. There's a lot of shoddy work going on, but my pieces don't discolor or damage easily. As I told you, I was born with a paintbrush in my hand and I have always made my own paints, I mix them my way: It's a secret."

And where is Matamoros' studio, his easel?

What he's looking for he has at his side. I think he is joking but it turns out to be a sort of tobacconist's bench to which he has crudely nailed a vertical panel. The wood is much more aged than he because Matamoros doesn't give up his mischievousness, his private laughs and his wisdom. His mental agility is as surprising as his pulse and the suggestions of his painting.

"Do you still work?" I ask.

"Every day," he replies, "even if they're only in small formats when I don't have larger canvases."

"What time do you do it?"

"While the day's light allows it, and where I live there's a lot of it," he says.

Later that day he finds out that one of his paintings was exhibited in New York last year, in a show presented by the Center for Cuban Studies. Naturally that made him happy: he is a rebellious artist, but he's human. He knows that he has felt fulfilled for many years.

"But I test myself even painting a postcard for Mother's Day," he affirms.

Matamoros' work completed the trilogy of popular paintings (as it was known in the 1950s) by Cuban non-professionals, along with F. Acevedo and Rafael Moreno.

Matamoros never studied art in the academy, although he doesn't begrudge those who have had that privilege. He found what he learned in Estudio Libre sufficient for improving his techniques and practices.

Great Cuban painters enrolled with him in the Estudio Libre de pintura y escultura (Free Studio for Painting and Sculpture) created by Abela in the 1930s. Among his classmates were René Portocarrero, of the flowers, the cities, the cathedrals, the murals; Mariano Rodríguez, of the roosters and masses; the multifaceted Jorge Arche; and Rita Longa, the sculptor who is still alive.

In 1939 Matamoros exhibited in the Prado Gallery, which was owned by a woman who most represented the Cuban bourgeoisie, María Luisa Gómez Mena. During that period the guest house where Matamoros worked closed its doors, and he had to work as a servant in a private residence until 1944. Then he began to work as a bricklayer in various construction projects. But he did not stop painting.

His works can today be found in England, Canada, Italy, France, the United States, Russia, Switzerland, Venezuela, and other countries.

For Matamoros' one-man exhibition, La vida en el paisaje (A Life in Landscapes), which was presented in Havana's Museum of Fine Arts in June 1987, the critic Alberto Quevedo wrote of him, "In the end Jay Matamoros is a hedonistic, sensual painter, of extremely Cuban stock, of unmatched freshness, of living and simple images. But perhaps the greatest uniqueness of his wonderful adventure lies in his having realized a body of work in which the landscape tells the story of Jay Matamoros and in turn Jay Matamoros tells his own history through the landscape."

Translated by Jane Marcus-Delgado