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The silkscreen represents the fatal separation between Filí Melé (Euridice) and Palés (Orpheus) and is dramatized by the proximity of the two hands that almost touch on Orpheus’ lyre. The lyre represents music, art, and poetry. This is a metaphor for the destiny that awaits the poet, who can only have access to his beloved through art and poetry. Art is seen here as the bridge that connects us with the spiritual world (Euridice is also the soul) and with the goddess as the archetype of nature.

by Rafael Trelles

For more information about the silkscreen call:
(787) 722-3366
proarte@proartemusical.com

Rafi Trelles is, without a doubt, one of the most recognized current Puerto Rican artists in and outside of Puerto Rico. Trelles dedicates himself almost exclusively to oil, and recently, to non-traditional media. Silkscreens by Trelles are rare, which increases the economic value of our silkscreen print.

The print run is limited. Only 100 copies and a handful of artist’s proofs were printed, also numbered, which increases its value. Size 22″ x 30″. It includes more than 40 colors, which involve the same number of passes in each copy, creating a very elaborate work with an unusual level of nuance and contrast.

The silkscreen is an exploration of the relationship between the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the work of one of our greatest poets, Luis Palés Matos, the cycle of poems to Filí Melé. It exposes, in parallelism with the erotic conquest, the paradox of the creative act: an attempt to translate beauty into artistic language, never fully achieved and is frustrated and even destroyed in the attempt, only to obsessively insinuate itself again in the mind of the creator.

The silkscreen shows the moment when Orpheus, thanks to music, has gained access to hell and is in the process of rescuing his beloved Eurydice. But Orpheus, with a forbidden glance in Eurydice’s direction, loses her again. (The expressions on Orpheus’s face, as he confirms the effect of his transgression, at the very moment it occurs, and on Eurydice’s face, are exceptionally successful.) The verses with which Palés concludes his last poem in the cycle are descriptive of this painful frustration: “…lost and already conquered forever, faithful escape, Filí Melé abolished”.

The highly complex and exquisitely executed silkscreen is replete with marine symbols, a Palés obsession, and allusions to African and Western myths as well as other Palés poems, such as the coiled serpent in Eurydice, reminiscent of the enigmatic figure of Lepromonida, one of his strangest poems. The game between the gazes of Orpheus, Eurydice, the serpent, the fish, the semi-submerged idol, and the masks, recalls the description that Palés makes at the beginning of the first poem of the cycle, of the body of Filí Melé: “the body, crystallized nudity, it is nudity in light so naked, that when looking at it you’re gazing at the gaze”. The clearly dreamlike atmosphere of the silkscreen also evokes that same atmosphere in the verses of Palés “…and in the distance, the wing of a candle is disappearing, it is going away, vanishing, and I am also losing myself in it, and when I finally return, in a slight glimmer of consciousness, how far I already find myself from myself, what a strange world surrounds me…”

By: Juan C. Perez Otero, Esq.