Article published in La Provincia on Friday, April 19, 2019
There are art critics in the Canary Islands who have developed a good part of their work in the kitchens of political and institutional power. They have always been there. They belong to the landscape. In this environment is the profile of Fernando Castro Borrego.
Some setbacks have come to Fernando Castro in recent years: the cancellation of an exhibition that had been produced by the Canary Government (Poetry and painting?), the withdrawal of confidence in the direction of the Library of Canary Artists, the denial of Parliament to publish a book of his (according to his own information) and, also, his dismissal as a member of the scientific committee of the César Manrique Foundation (FCM). It is difficult for Fernando Castro to adapt and, above all, to do without resentment.
In these weeks, the critic and professor of Art History at the University of La Laguna (ULL) has not been able to bear that the FCM not only does not count on him, but has decided as an independent entity not to collaborate with the Cabildo of Lanzarote in the centenary of César Manrique. The leaders of the Foundation considered that for any collaboration there should be consensus among all political forces, and there was not.
In various media, Fernando Castro has lashed out against the FCM. We know that an art critic and university professor who has always been in the shadow of power has little credibility left. But it is possible that someone will come to believe his made-up truths. I give two examples of what he is saying without the slightest intellectual shame. Fernando Castro points out that the FCM does not defend an essential part of the artist's creative activity, his painting. The FCM editions immediately deny this: César Manrique. New York, César Manrique. Painting, César Manrique, 1950-1957. The FCM has counted on numerous art specialists in its publications, from Lázaro Santana to Eugenio Carmona, including Fernando Castro. I witnessed in 2005, in addition, the effort and support that the FCM gave to the first great national exhibition of César Manrique's painting, at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art.
The following example is more sophisticated, but no less false. Fernando Castro makes a comparison with obvious conclusions for him. He raises it in an erudite tone. Let's imagine, he suggests, that the cubist Fernand Léger, who was a communist, had created a foundation. It would be unimaginable for his foundation to be run by fascists. "The reverse is what has happened here," he stresses. And he doesn't blush. Whoever listens to him must understand that Manrique was a fascist, because he built his work under Francoism and with institutional support from the Francoist order, and also that the direction of the FCM, in the opposite sense, turns out to be communist. He manufactures the conceptual horizon and deploys it with conviction. He takes it for granted, even though he knows it is not true, that Manrique's "apolitical" character can shift towards fascism to adjust his premise and that, then, to continue with a parallel without blemish, the leaders of the FCM belong to the ideology of the extreme left. The Canarian artist would then be exactly the reverse of Léger; and the direction of the FCM, the reverse of the fascists. This is how Fernando Castro paints those who have confronted institutional power (since the time of Dimas Martín) and with politicians of different ideological stripes in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands and in places outside the islands.
But the assumption grows from the beginning on shaky foundations. It is impossible to imagine a Fernand Léger Foundation run by communists. Castro assumes what he knows falls under its own weight: communists would never allow a center of such characteristics to be run by fascists, but he persists in pointing towards horizons that the reader/spectator must respond to according to pure logic: how is it possible that a situation occurs in the FCM, which is the reverse of the foundation of a communist, with a fascist artist and with a leftist direction? In his eagerness to establish the argumentative plot of his fantasy, he hides things that, I believe, he knows well: Léger participated independently in La Querelle du réalisme developed in the environment of the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR, Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) in the years 1935-1936, and in this socialist and revolutionary space he was far from the official positions of communism and Stalinism. Léger was then over fifty years old. Only when he returns to France after American exile, after the Second World War, that is, at the end of 1945, does he join the Communist Party. He was already a sexagenarian. The circumstances after the exile in the USA and the immediate post-war period, the ideological evolution of Léger, what do they have to do with the political attitude and the ideological evolution of César Manrique? The parallel, like the fascists who run the unreal Fernand Léger Foundation, is a chimera invented to confuse: after 1945, fascism in Europe was defeated. On the other hand, when the artist dies, his closest relatives decide to build the Musée Fernand Léger to preserve his legacy, obviously according to their criteria. The heirs of the FCM, created a few months before Manrique's death, do exactly the same: preserve the legacy. And the FCM does so in the various fields that occupied the activity of our artist, no matter how much Castro insists on pointing out the opposite.
Under the respectable appearance of a university professor, arguments can be plotted that gladden the faces of power or that can entertain unwary students, but this has little scope. I also know this from my experience as a professor of Spanish Literature at the ULL. What amazes me is that resentment with the FCM wants to turn it into an exercise of denunciation and critical freedom, of daring in the face of what very few dare to denounce. Collaborating with one or another institution, public or private, with the Cabildo or with the Foundation, does not mean inventing chimeras to discredit opponents, nor inventing fables to settle personal scores.
The FCM is far from that extreme left that the ULL professor presumes. If it were not so, following his logic, why has Fernando Castro spent a quarter of a century as a member of the scientific committee? And if César Manrique as "apolitical" was not far from fascism, according to his didactic invention, what has led him to remain in it for so long? The national and international prestige of this institution has not been gained with sectarianism and submission to power, but with independence, something that our resentful professor knows well.
The FCM does not depend on subsidies or institutional money and, therefore, can decide not to participate in the political interests that govern the Cabildo of Lanzarote, the Government of the Canary Islands or any other public institution. In the projection of the artist's work and the celebration of the centenary, the FCM has decided to collaborate with the curator Katrin Steffen and the Atlantic Center of Modern Art, with the University of La Laguna, with the Cervantes Institute, with numerous companies of difficult leftist fit (Cabrera Medina, Binter, Canary Fly, Fred Olsen, Naviera Armas, Hiperdino, Renault Juan Toledo, Grupo Spínola?) and with various national and international critics, intellectuals and artists. You can do it. The Foundation is independent. At this point, does Fernando Castro Borrego want to pull the atavistic fear of Francoism out of the hat? The lie of a spiteful person is always in sight and, also, the arguments "made up" with erudite logic.
By Nilo Palenzuela