After a decade-long experiment with geometric abstraction, Mario Carreño returned to figurative painting in the 1960s in part as a response to the trauma of World War II and its reconstruction, which he witnessed firsthand during travel to Europe in 1962-1963. Among the first works to emerge from this period was the series of drawings titled Un mundo petrificado, which he described at the time as “the result of my restlessness and fear before the possibility of a new world war, against the helplessness of the majority of humankind, incapable of preventing such a catastrophe.” Sonata de la piedra y de la carne belongs to a later iteration of this series, made in oil, undertaken in 1967. In its fragmented bodies and elegiac splendor, Sonata de la piedra y de la carne distills the devastation of the postwar world through a classical armature: elegant folds of blue drapery shroud ashen, ossifying flesh; at the center of the painting, a withered vena cava branches lifelessly outward. Cut-out silhouettes echo the curves of faceless, atrophied bodies, the negative space inculcating the melancholy of absence and loss. Although the dismembered and disfigured bodies reference the casualties of world war, they may also acknowledge the emotions surrounding Carreño’s own separation from Cuba, which he left in 1957 (he became a Chilean citizen in 1969), and the realities of exile and diasporic identity that faced many of his generation. A somber meditation on the splintering of human and national bodies, Sonata de la piedra y de la Carne suggests the universality of pain, rendered in the painterly and psychosomatic transformation of flesh into stone.
Mario Carreño was born in Havana and enrolled at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro in 1925. He held his first solo exhibition at Sala Merás y Rico in Havana in 1930. In 1932 he departed for Spain, where he studied at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid from 1932 to 1935 while working as an illustrator for the magazine Octubre (as “Karreño”). He returned to Havana in 1935 and left the following year for Mexico, coming into contact with the revolutionary Mural movement. With the Dominican painter Jaime Colson, he traveled to Paris in 1937 and studied at the École des Arts Appliqués and the Académie Julian from 1937 to 1939, developing a mature style grounded in the classical tradition stretching from Renaissance Italy to the School of Paris. Carreño emerged as a leading figure of the Havana School during the 1940s, celebrated for increasingly stylized paintings of the tropical Cuban vernacular. Based mostly in New York, he exhibited frequently at Perls Gallery and contributed eleven works—including the Duco panels Sugar-Cane Cutters and Afro-Cuban Dance—to the landmark exhibition Modern Cuban Painters, organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. José Gómez Sicre published two monographs on Carreño during this period, first for the Galería del Prado (Havana, 1943) and subsequently for the Pan American Union (Washington, D.C., 1947). Carreño returned to Havana at the end of the decade and, with Luis Martínez Pedro and Sandú Darié, with whom he founded the magazine Noticias de Arte (1952-1953), became a leading advocate for geometric abstraction. Carreño settled permanently in Chile in 1957 and his later work adapted Constructivist forms within surreal and dreamlike landscapes, often, as in the Antillanas series, revisiting themes present in his earlier work. He received Cuba’s National Award in Painting in 1938 and Chile’s National Art Award in 1982.
