Armando Reverón inadvertently inaugurated an unexplained�and perhaps unexplainable�version of modernity, whose destiny is not less formal, nor is it less absorbed nor less indifferent, but whose medium, whose possibility resides in an inexorable corporeal transition. Those who saw Reverón paint know about the myths and beliefs he was trying to evoke or exorcise by means of certain kinds of dance and concentration which had as an obsessive focus his own body. With bonds tightly wrapped round his torso, violently keeping his body in check, half of the painter�s body came to be like the projection of the horizon in his paintings. One might pretend that, notwithstanding, his landscape art, close to vanishing but never to immateriality, was profoundly marked by the living presence, the anxious experience of the limits of the body. One is dealing here with a landscape of the possible, with a visibility filtered, dulled, by the mutedness of the body.

In this way, what in other places was an ideal paradigm, an equation, an abrupt spiritual creation�painting as both a clear and despoiled arena, the revealing evidence of its flatness, an embodiment which denounced both its media and its "medium"�became pure resignation, pure subjectivity in Reverón, corporeal submission to the visual that was irreparably embodied in his painting. As a result, our monochrome was, then, and is, now, a landscape art of the Caribbean beaches�a reality, not a spatial concept�just as our reduction of painting to its logarithm of spatiality was an existential space, sensitively represented, a dune, an enclosure, a playón in which the artisanal and precarious irregularities of support served as an occasion for a pictorial "kairos," a holocaust of pictorial mimesis.

The model of this first landscape of light, then, is that of the eclipse. Reverón exposes himself like Icarus to the sun in order to allow his works to become constituted by the light he glimpsed at the borders of the opacity of his body. In more than one of his paintings he appears this way: back-lit, placing what can be identified as the corporeal mass of his body against the desert of the canvas and against the light which, as it filters through, draws outlines on the canvas, as is described in certain ancient legends. The myth of a heroic encounter with light should then be nuanced: not only did Reverón paint with light-glow, he also painted, above all, with shadows. From very early on, as in the construction of a magnificent house which passes through a series of stages: from pleasant place to garden, from tropical arcadia to shady funeral mound, Reverón gradually inscribed latticework in his painting, he constructed his painting as a kind of filtering device. One of his works is entitled, Luz tras mi enramada [Light behind my branches], poetically symbolic more than any other of the first Reveronian experiments with proximity and distance in relation to light.

Reverón, still faithful to the world and to visible phenomena, has taken painting to the primordial state in which only its deconstructed materiality is seen, the virtual matter of its image. El árbol [The tree] is the emblem and the result of this process: drops of light on the ground of the support, a deconstructed, loose, indolent, exacerbated, pointillism; the height of a disappearance which would have the traces of things in pictorial mimesis as the condition of the apparition of a kind of filtered painting in a state of pure possibility: "truth in painting."

This all leads one to think that the luminous obnubilation of the early Reverón is the beginning of a pictorial process marked by a certain "lack," which would not only demonstrate the possible but also the inevitably visible seen through a "pathetic" kind of landscape art, since it was the consequence of a pure "optic passion": to go from painting to its underpinnings, to go from the signs of the figures to the shadows of things, from the icon to the clue, that is to say, from what is written to what is inscribed, to what is printed, from what is voluntarily drawn to what is involuntarily a stain. The result of all this, possessing unexpected theoretical consequences, is that monochromy�and not the monochrome�made its appearance in America through Reverón, like an atmospheric accident, like a catastrophe of light, and, finally, as a kind of "ruining" of the landscape.

We will precisely evoke the model of the "ruin" to understand what is to be found in the Reveronian desert landscape. A certain theorist of architecture from the great century of the baroque, speaking of Vitrubius, came to the conclusion that because the ruin is the remains of a building�s outline, it is what precisely most approximates the original plan of the building. The ruin existentially coincides with, articulates and "sutures" the ideal state with the end result of the building. The ruin, then, must be the theoretical matrix of the building. We can then say the same thing about landscape when, as in Reverón, only its traces remain in a holocaust of light. What remains is what lies beneath and transcends any landscape: the extenuation from which it arises, a plain of absolute painting, a desert.

Thus, in El playón (1942), we see the accidental protuberances of the support, a dense suture in the canvas, an excrescence of the material, a topical closeness of the subjectum, all occasions for convoking the eye of he who beholds the light, which is not immateriality, but precisely a material excess, pure remains, overabundance, and pictorial supplements. Reverón�s painting constitutes, over the evidence of this grain of materiality, the strange, unrecognizable grounds of an organic modernity. There, in the indefinable interstices between the stripped space of representation and the blinded representation of space, Reverón�s painting reaches its double valence of painting and representation, of image and matter, of figure and figurability.