In his remarks on the series of paintings Apu Inca Atawallpaman inspired by the colonial-era Quechua poem of the same name, Sebastián Salazar Bondy rejects criticism that “sets out to speak FROM painting” and, thus, marginalizes theme. He argues that the work’s complex organicity undermines any attempt to act as “[the poem’s] translator,” that is, to speak “FROM its core.” Salazar Bondy recounts how he came to articulate his reflections on the ties between the Quechua text and de Szyszlo’s series of paintings. The paintings’ initial impact on the writer lay in the “living and dynamic visual world that was an image of my own self and of the process at play in my personal and social world.” At the poem’s impetus, the series of paintings represents “a particular infringement of the present.” Salazar Bondy emphatically asserts that “we are on the path to salvaging our myths or, in their absence, to inventing them, and the eulogy translated by [José María] Arguedas (…) conceals the fervor to get even and subsequently restore a lost truth.” Hence, Salazar Bondy argues that, insofar as they unreservedly represent “the revolution we have awaited,” de Szyszlo’s paintings formulate “liberation” not of a technical order, “but rather of content and attitude.” Salazar Bondy eschews any formalist reading of a series that, in his view, “raises awareness of contemporary displeasure.” 

In this text, essayist, critic, and polemist Sebastián Salazar Bondy comments on the series of canvases by Fernando de Szyszlo based on Apu Inca Atawallpaman, a colonial-era Quechua poem translated into Spanish by writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas; the series was exhibited at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo in Lima in 1963.

While abstraction was initially defined as a cosmopolitan language, it veered, in the late fifties in Peru, towards a formal repertoire rooted in pre-Hispanic art. Artist Fernando de Szyszlo was crucial to that process, as well as one of its most polemic spokespersons. His production, starting in those years, entailed a series of chromatic and archetypal references suggestive of the universe of pre-Columbian art, particularly of pre-Incan coastal cultures; in some cases, he even used Quechua titles. This strain of his work reached its height with the series Apu Inca Atawallpaman (1963), inspired by the colonial-era Quechua poem of the same title translated into Spanish by writer and anthropologist José María Arguedas (1911–69). The poem addresses the death of the last Inca emperor at the hands of the Spanish conquerors; its eulogy-like character took on obvious political connotations with the rise of anthropological studies and social struggles in the region. The series occasioned a significant critical reaction from, among others, poet Emilio Adolfo Westphalen (1911–2001), which in turn influenced later readings of the painter’s work. Pursuant to the critical acclaim enjoyed by the show of the paintings in Lima—it even received praise from long-standing opponents of abstraction like Sebastián Salazar Bondy (1924–65)—the series was exhibited in a number of cities around the continent, starting with the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá. It was in response to that show in the Colombian capital that influential young critic Marta Traba (1923–83) asserted that the Atawalpa series was one of the soundest attempts to venture a modern artistic language with Americanist content. De Szyszlo’s work, then, came to be seen as “progressive” and, hence, tied to the expectations that the Cuban Revolution stirred in Latin American leftist intellectuals. In 1968, the series was exhibited at the Casa de las Américas in Havana; only three years later, de Szyszlo publically broke with Fidel Castro’s regime due to its treatment of writer Heberto Padilla (1971).