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Kearny Road Cemetary Commemoration

In commemoration of the unnamed children buried at the recently excavated cemetery on Kearny Road, Juanito and friend Rick Gonzalez created a beautiful retablo depicting the unnamed ones as they are fostered to revelation by angels.

(Original article from the Santa Fe New Mexican)

Retablos: An Expression of Ancient Art

By James K. Gavin
For The Santa Fe New Mexican

“The retablo is the New Mexican window to the divine,” said Charlie Carrillo during a recent interview in the kitchen of his Santa Fe home.

Carrillo is a santero, literally “a saint maker,” an artist who makes retablos. He abandoned his career as an archaeologist almost 25 years ago to devote himself to studying the history of this form and to painting.

“Retablos are storytellers,” he said. “They are stories of the saints captured on wood.”

Carrillo said that in the days of his ancestors people used to respond to the retablos in their homes as if the essence of the saint were living in the painting. “The saint became like a member of the family, a daily presence. He, or she, might even mess up from time to time, be scolded or made fun of.” Carrillo believes that this familial relationship with the saint offered a way for people to understand the incarnation of Christ in nontheological terms.

What is a retablo? According to the Diccionario de la Lengua Española of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, a retablo is a group or collection of painted or carved figures that present in serial form a story or event. The word comes from the Latin retro tabula meaning “behind the altar,” referring to a large painting or grouping of paintings hung or mounted behind and above the altar, an altar screen. In New Mexico, this is sometimes called a retablo mayor.

But the word retablo by itself has a very specific meaning here in Northern New Mexico. It is a painting of a religious figure or figures on a board, usually pine, whose surface has been prepared with gesso.

Carrillo, co-author with his Jesuit colleague Thomas J. Steele, of the just released A Century of Retablos: The Janis and Dennis Lyons Collection of New Mexican Santos, 1780-1880, (Hudson Hills Press, 2007) expressed his idea about the efficacy of the 21st-century retablos. Speaking of the modern-day buyer who may be a collector rather than a believer, he said, “Who knows? They may still get some benefit from the long-term presence of the saint in their house.”

From the mid-18th century through the arrival of the railroad in New Mexico in 1879, the art of the retablo flourished in Northern New Mexico. However, the train brought with it new people, new materials and products, new ideas. For a time the traditional art of the New Mexican santero languished. It was practiced and appreciated by few. Then in the second half of the 20th century it experienced a robust rebirth. This is due in large part to the creation of The Spanish Colonial Art Society in 1926 and the society’s subsequent establishment of Spanish Market, which became a permanent annual event in 1965, and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in 2002, which houses an excellent collection of historic and contemporary retablos.

The Franciscan friars who came with Don Juan de Oñate, who led the expedition that began the Spanish settlement of New Mexico in 1598, set about their mission of Christianizing the indigenous people of the Rio Grande Valley with dedication. By 1635 there may have been as many as 40 mission churches. These churches and the convents and other related buildings needed art both for devotion and as teaching tools. Prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, most of this art came up from Mexico in great caravans that made the arduous journey up the Camino Real every three years. Very little of this art – in the Baroque style then in fashion – survived the deliberated destruction of all traces of Christianity during the revolt.

With the resettlement of New Mexico under the leadership of Don Diego de Vargas in 1693-94, Spanish authority, both political and religious, was reimposed in a manner more accommodating to Pueblo peoples. Once again art was needed to meet devotional and educational objectives of the Catholic Church. Initially the art would have been imported from Mexico. By the mid-18th century, however, there were local artists producing the paintings and sculptures, and a new uniquely New Mexican aesthetic was coming to be.

In the pictorial space they create a two-dimensional world. The Baroque style of the previous century gave way to the Rococco, a more fanciful elaboration of the Baroque. However, Rococco embellishments were not eliminated by the local santeros; rather, they were reduced and simplified. The human form became stylized, but the ability to express emotion was not compromised. The palette was limited to colors obtained from local vegetation and minerals with a few pigments that came up from México. These factors and the living conditions of the artists themselves, working under the same hardships as all their brethren who were struggling to survive in this unforgiving environment, resulted in a devotional art unlike any other.

Sitting in his studio in Tesuque discussing the emergence of this distinctly New Mexican art form, present-day santero Juanito Jimenez said of his 18th-century forebears, “They were so isolated! They had to be resourceful. There was no milled lumber, so they split a log and adzed it, found some gypsum rock and ground it down (for gesso). They made their brushes out of yucca fiber, horse hair, chicken feathers – anything that would work. … They were resourceful people. They gave rise to a new form of art.”

“Some people,” he continued, “see the retablo as primitive. I don’t. This is an art form that developed here. This is what they saw.”

Donna Pierce, curator of the Spanish Colonial Collection of the Denver Art Museum, wrote in Spanish New Mexico, (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996), “…the religious art of New Mexico, although strongly grounded in the Spanish Catholic religious tradition, is a distillation of many influences that forms a stunning new style that is instantly recognizable and unique to the region.”

Jimenez, the Spanish Market Artist of the Year in 2005, reflected on what painting retablos means to him. “It is a way of tying me together with the Almighty. I use it as a form of prayer, as a form of penance, as a pilgrimage. Doing retablos we’re leaving footprints …and some day, I may not even be alive, someone will follow those footprints and be helped, find comfort or peace.”