The critic Cipriano Vitureira analyzes the landscapes of the Lunas series by José Cuneo, highlighting his treatment of color, in particular the handling of light and glare. He mentions the Uruguayan European artistic development and his ability in subjectively transferring and integrating what he had learned in capturing local landscape. This would take the representations of the sky and the lunar surfaces made by Cuneo to a place of fantastically homegrown realism. This was perhaps to some extent one of the exceptional landscape examples in Uruguay in what has been known as “magic realism.”

This critique by Cipriano Santiago Vitureira (1907−1977), included in his book Arte Simple (Montevideo, 1937), highlights the “nocturnal silence” of the series Ranchos y Lunas by the artist José Cuneo (1887−1977). In his comparisons, the author compares the moon to the depth of a cistern, in the way of capturing a microcosm (either by the limits of the canvas or the brocade), praising the treatment of space as an “inward” universe. He links the lunar light curves with sensuality, as it “writhes relentlessly,” reiterating what he said in another essay, that “Nature is unchangeable, who changes is man.” With this, Vitureira points to certain links that other critics had previously observed in Cuneo’s work, as well as his performance in the formation of local artist groups. In describing and analyzing his lunar landscapes, he compares it to this European tour, highlighting towns such as Cagnes-sur-Mer (France), which he visited during the twenties and thirties, and when the Uruguayan artist watered down his expressionistic influences. A trend that promoted substantial changes in the conception of the local landscape, especially in relation to distorting “the visual” in service of a reality that becomes subjective and nocturnal. Due to this change, Vitureira asserts that the artist has “cosmically” felt that the landscape is a reflection that retreats into romantic reminiscences, mixed with those that are expressionistic and primitive and are all understood in a primordial sense. Everything is linked to an emotional and formal realism of the local landscape, which is definitively linked to new ways of feeling and new art with a synthesis of the “local and universal.”