Cristino de Vera, painter of God and doubt | Culture | EUROtoday

Cristino de Vera (Tenerife, December 15, 1931) got here to the environment of EL PAÍS, in Miguel Yuste, to eat apples with associates, on the time when the good Canarian artist consumed what the sky, God or portray advised him. His lifelong love, Aurora Ciriza, rescued him for day by day life, and that did huge good for his survival as a human being and as a painter.

An ideal painter, a pal of painters and likewise a pal of the entire world, a pupil of Vásquez Díaz, in his youth he warmed his physique, or cooled himself, earlier than the canvases of El Greco within the Prado Museum. It was frequent to see him, in occasions of his nice growth in life, avoiding the site visitors lights of Madrid, addressing passers-by with litanies that included questions on God or about happiness or about concern.

He requested folks, in any circumstance, in the event that they had been glad, and in the event that they weren’t, he additionally taught anybody with what he knew about God and males. He sang, or helped sing, amidst guitars that he thought-about a part of his personal voice, and thus he improvised verses that right this moment could be used for the recitals by which Cristino de Vera, who died on the age of 94, transformed friendship and the enjoyment of the nights.

On these nights after I solely ate apples, I referred to as the chums I selected on the cellphone. Around midnight, that was his time. The goal was to stop those that he already knew could be awake from watching tv. Their dialog at that hour, Cristino’s midnight, was very important and instructive: he wished all of them near goodness and really removed from the meanness that, for instance, they had been accustomed to watching: tv.

When I met him, in Madrid, collectively together with his associates Domingo Pérez Minik and Fernando Delgado, Cristino de Vera was getting ready a big exhibition in Tenerife, at all times together with his mystical, complete work, works that summoned the essence of his soul. Pérez Minik, vital author of the surrealist period, critic of Insula, certainly one of his nice associates, it was for him Sunday, simply as virtually all of the others had been referred to as in diminutive. He stopped the world, and the ages, and his portray itself was his manner of stopping demise from coming. Until latest years, when he summoned her as if that infinite woman was on the door.

“Dominguito, a whiskey?” he mentioned to his previous pal, that evening I met him. Aurora, who was then his perpetually companion, made that night by which Pérez Minik and the nonetheless younger Cristino shared whiskey in milk cups. In Tenerife, the place he went particularly within the summers, to see his mother and father, to wash, he walked alongside the road that led to the ocean as if he had been returning to the world by which his desires resided. One day I requested Cristino what his metaphor for time was, as a result of he was at all times searching for the essence of what escapes, life.

He advised me: “They said that time was God’s ally, something of his silence, of the deep dark night with the stars shining. Looking at the stars you see that time is infinite. And all the silence of the starry skies is the echo of the infinite peace of the desert where so many seekers went to look for the echo, the voice, the explanation of how time can, with the help of all the mysteries of the earth, lead us to seek, to beg, the echo of the voice of the God of mercy. Always the mute harmony of silence, always the beauty of the things that surround us and purify our soul.” In an interview for this newspaper he told me when he turned 90, about the past in which he lived: “In Franco’s regime there was only pain without time.”

Tenerife was his place of return, always, and there he left in the hands of the Cristino de Vera Foundation, in La Laguna, in charge of Clara Cristina Armas de León, the greatest legacy of his work, open to other paintings that have made his inheritance as generous, and as open, as his own way of always offering the painting he made, so mystical, so related to God and the stars.

He was the heir of Zurbarán and Luis Fernández, Castilla, this country through which he walked like Quixote, was the strange continuation of the south of Tenerife, where he and his father (his great friend) found the essence of the island: the Red Mountain, which he shared, as if it were a painting, with his friend Dr. José Toledo.

Cristino never said anything that was not essential, close to the divine, and before the mountains and before the people he always spoke with the metaphor of a goodness that sometimes was of the guitar and sometimes was of love for God, whom he sought. He told me: “We must confront our poor and restricted language with the divine calligraphy that turns the whole lot into the silence of the best desert that’s deep loneliness… I realized the fantastic thing about Italy. It is the nation that has gathered probably the most magnificence. I noticed, subsequently, the gathered Italy. I attended to the silence that the spirit of man retains, of the religions that inform in regards to the divine, the power of time… I at all times maintained some religion, typically it went out, however I’ve at all times had a relationship with the divine.”

Juan Manuel Bonet, one of his great friends, said of him that he was “a hermit of painting.” His life was, Cristino said, a long interior journey: “I’ve gone in any case these mysteries that may restore religion. People suppose that faith is for kids to make their first communion, and they don’t delve into that mild that typically involves you within the morning and is a divine message wrapped in a white mild.”

A mystic of infinite religion in portray, he by no means stopped being the person who ate apples and appeared for God on the roads of Castile and his land and drank whiskey from cups of milk.