Editorial by Chris Gascon

Armando Santa Ana: “The Painted Sounds of Spanish”

November 16, 2011, Faculty Colloquium, Old Main, SUNY Cortland

When it comes to Mexican culture, Armando Santa Ana Chávez is something of a Renaissance man. He is here with us in the Department of Modern Languages this semester as a visiting professor of Mexican culture, but he is also a writer, a

sculptor, and a painter. He has been exhibiting his art since 1981, and has shown hundreds of pieces in dozens of individual and collective expositions. His artwork has been acquired by ten different museums in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Queretaro, Iztacala, and Berlin, Germany. His pieces are on display, in addition, in public areas and urban plazas on many UNAM campuses and cities around Mexico. In addition to his degrees in language and literature, Dr. Santa Ana has received formal training in transformation of acrylics, glass fusion techniques, herbal medicine, Buddhism, Tai-Chi, Chi-Kung, and psychotherapy. The last time he came to Cortland as a visiting professor, it was as a Fulbright scholar in 1994. He has been a visiting professor at Middlebury College as well. He has published books of poetry,

individual and collective art catalogs, and numerous essays and articles on a range of subjects both artistic and literary. 

The current collection of works, the Painted Sounds of Spanish, is a fascinating,

witty, fun, and important collection of innovative paintings that recall elements of

ancient pre-Columbian art while commenting on the present and pointing to the

future. As you may have read in some of the invitations, pamphlets and brochures that have circulated to publicize this event, these works feature combinations of  Spanish words that produce new ideas, with each fusion of concepts depicted beautifully, and often humorously, in mixed media. One of Dr. Santa Ana’s objectives is to pass on a theory of Mesoamerican-precolumbian image and text, creating a systematic model of writing-painting, a new code of communication, where words and images fuse together to create new ideas. Word and image come together, as in the glyphs of ancient Maya and Aztec art and writing. As Dr. Santa Ana explains it: “Throughout five thousand years of writing in different European languages, never has it happened like this. Literature went one way, painting another. But in ancient Mexico, different cultures for more then two thousand years joined books and writing on the city's walls and pyramids. They wrote and expressed themselves with painted

sounds. . .codes of dance, ritual theatre, and music. These are the cultural

heritage of all indigenous peoples of North and South American: each one created a modern writing system based on their own vision of the universe.”

Dr. Santa Ana thus looks to Mexico’s rich ancestral past for inspiration; but he is

at the same time engaged with the challenges of the contemporary world, and often comments on current issues in his work. Capitalistic greed, the technological revolution’s potential for dehumanization, neocolonial wars of territorial occupation, nuclear weapons and arms sales, political corruption, biotechnology, genomic science, and immigration are all alluded to in his pieces. Not that such matters weigh down his work; laughter, color, beauty, and optimism are Dr. Santa Ana’s antidotes to the challenges of modern society. 

Dr. Santa Ana, is in addition to all of this, one of the nicest people one could

have the pleasure of meeting. Soft spoken, cheerful, and gracious, there is an

eternal youthfulness and an inner peace about him. He is a great soul, and Modern Languages has been fortunate to serve as his home this semester. 

On that positive note, I present to you Armando Santa Ana’s exhibit, the Painted

Sounds of Spanish. Please take your time considering the paintings, and I hope you have a chance to speak with the artist himself to benefit from his unique personal insight. 

Thank you. 

Christopher D. Gascón, Chair

Department of Modern Languages