Art
Paintings of Rey Alfonso
University School of Nashville’s Artclectic, Oct. 25-28You can think of Rey Alfonso as a kind of heavy metal artist. Over the past 10 years, this remarkable Cuban-born creator has perfected the technique of melting pure, prismatic pigment onto a superheated aluminum canvas. The result has been nothing less than the creation of a new kind of art, one that blurs the distinction between painting and sculpture.
“I call this style of art pintura ardiente, or heat painting, and inventing it was harder than you might think,” Alfonso says. “The problem is that I work on aircraft-grade aluminum, and under normal circumstances paint just rolls right off that kind of surface. The solution to the problem was to set the whole thing on fire.”
About a dozen of Alfonso’s heat paintings will be on display this weekend at the University School of Nashville, as part of an annual fundraiser and art show called Artclectic. In all, Artclectic will feature the work of 58 distinguished artists, but it’s the Chattanooga-based Alfonso who will be the star of the show.
“It still seems amazing that we were able to get someone like Rey into this show,” says Lee Ann Merrick, an art teacher at USN. “Some of his Chattanooga friends encouraged him to apply, but even after we accepted him he was extremely skeptical about whether this would be a good place to show his work. But we invited him up and he loved our space. And our students loved him, especially when he talked about his escape from Cuba.”
Born in 1974, Alfonso grew up in an intensely political household. His father had fought alongside Fidel Castro to overthrow the Batista regime. But over time the elder Alfonso had a falling out with the dictator.
“My father thought Castro had forgotten what the revolution was all about,” says Alfonso, who was in town sporting his own Communist party T-shirt, one featuring cartoon images of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro wearing party hats and drinking beer. “My father became very outspoken. It went downhill from there.”
While his father was picking fights with his old comrades, Alfonso began mastering the skills of his future craft. At 12, he became an apprentice at his uncle’s metal shop in Matanzas, where, according to his own press materials, “Rey worked as a man, dreamed as a boy, and created his visions from scrap metal.”
Of course, political freedom is the oxygen of a true artistic vision, so at 16 Alfonso gambled his future and set to sea in a primitive handmade boat. The U.S. Coast Guard plucked him from the middle of the ocean, and he’s lived in political exile in this country ever since.
It was while living in Seattle in the late 1990s that Alfonso perfected his technique of painting with pure pigments and heat.
He begins each work with a large sheet of aircraft-grade aluminum—the exact same material used to build 747 jets—which is sandblasted and treated with an acid mixture before being slowly heated in a kiln to a temperature of 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Alfonso then adds multiple layers (in some instances as many as 1,500) of pigment, obtaining his colors by grinding semiprecious stones, such as the blue lapis lazuli, into a fine powder.
“I melt these pigments directly into the aluminum, and at that temperature the color fuses directly into the metal,” Alfonso says. “So it’s not just adding color to a surface, like an oil painting, since the color is becoming a part of the aluminum at the molecular level.”
Most of Alfonso’s heat paintings are large, about 6 by 7 feet, which is the standard size for a typical strip of aircraft aluminum. At first blush, his works all seem to look alike, mostly because they all boast the same kinds of shapes and patterns—circles, cones, lines, grids and such. But on closer inspection you see that the colors on each painting are all dramatically different.
“You get very different colors when you use pure pigments,” Alfonso says. “The blue you get from one piece of lapis lazuli will always be different from a second piece. No two pieces are the same.”
The shapes and patterns are also arranged differently on each of the paintings, and those variations inspired Alfonso to come up with evocative titles, such as “Laughing Universe” and “The Philosopher’s Headache.”
Alfonso moved from the West Coast to Chattanooga several years ago, in part because most of his clients (he’s been known to sell his artwork to corporations for as much as $200,000) are located in the East. But he and his wife (artist Patricia de Leon Alfonso) also needed a huge amount of space for their various furnaces, kilns and other tools and fixtures, and they found an ideal 20,000-square-foot warehouse in Tennessee.
“Now I have the space and freedom I need to create my art,” says Alfonso. “And here in America I can create my art without worrying about being shot.”