For any receptive and analytical artist the participation in the development of such important art works such as Del Porfirismo a la Revolution in the National Museum of History, Patricios y Patricidas in the Ex Aduana of Santo Domingo, El Arte Escenico en la Vida Social de Mexico in the National Association of Performers, and above all in La Marcha de la Humanidad en la Tierra y Hacia el Cosmos, cannot be any other than determinant, as it was for Guillermo Ceniceros. Yet his methods, his sensibility and his aspirations and projects are very different than those of Siqueiros. An artist of interiorities, has understood in his own way the anti-dogma and anti-academism which Siqueiros predicated, a liberation from the limitations and puritanism of traditional tools. Although Siqueiros did not theorize about gesticulation and painting with action, it was in his New York Experimental Workshop, where for the first time in the United States accidental effects, be that pictorial or by instrument, were used. Ceniceros arrives at the painting of “action” directly via Siqueiros, without the bend or deviation of Jackson Pollock; but something must be insisted on: neither Ceniceros’ procedures nor his results are Siqueirianos. Ceniceros searches textures enriched by randomness and then he substitutes the brush for the cloth of shirts, cheesecloth or whips. The attitude then is that of a completely different order to that of grabbing a tubular piece of wood with hair in the ends. All the body must concentrate to give the certain strike in the canvas of the pictorial substance contained in the end of the cloth of a shirt, the cheesecloth, or that of a whip. To add a system to some of his effects, Ceniceros converts straight spatulas into serrated ones, and when in need to use a larger serrated spatula for larger dimensions and even teeth, he utilizes large carpenter saws with modified handles. What is singular is that Ceniceros is not keen of “luxury painting”. His own effects are there to achieve a textural base in which he impresses an austere contour of feminine appearance or of landscape. His aesthetic attitude takes him to the multitudinal pool of secret painters.
Marie Lockman 