José María Cundín’s Worlds of Contradictions

From a studio in Folsom, The Spanish avant-garde master is a storyteller in the abstract

by

Visual & Performing Arts

Where pastures meet oak trees and silence settles over a tranquil pond in Folsom, Louisiana, José María Cundín continues to create against time, against expectation, and in an unrelenting pursuit of meaning.

Nearing eighty-eight years old, Cundín remains a vital thread in the Spanish avant-garde artistic movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, and distinguished by its use of bold abstraction, surrealism, and conceptual innovation to express dissent and critique political power.

A Basque-Spanish painter, sculptor, and multidisciplinary artist of international acclaim, Cundín has called Louisiana home for decades. He is the last living member of the original Orleans Gallery, a groundbreaking artist-run collective that once included such contemporary luminaries as George Dunbar, Ida Kohlmeyer, Lin Emery, and John Clemmer. These were titans of culture who were disciplined, daring, and deliberate—artists not bound by style, but by a seriousness of purpose and a commitment to craft. That gallery wasn’t just a venue—it was a cultural engine, the first standalone contemporary art space in the South. More than a physical space, it was a beacon: a bold stance against artistic conformity, a living laboratory for risk, invention, and resistance.

Cundín speaks of the original Orleans like one speaks of a vanished homeland. The loss of the gallery’s physical presence is one thing; the fading of its ethos is another. “The connection,” he says, “has been lost.” The gallery and his work, he insists, were never meant to reflect the world back to us as it is, but to challenge us to reimagine what it could be.

[Read about another European ex-pat artist, Letitia Huckaby]

Step into Cundín’s Folsom studio today and you enter a world where abstraction meets memory, and satire tangles with reverence. One is met with not only the usual pungency of oil paint but also notes of tobacco, fine European cologne, and freshly cut wood. He greets visitors like old friends, ushering them onto a throne-like chair while he settles into a worn office seat.

“I’m not the bad boy artist some would have you think,” he smirks. “You put your leg through one commissioned canvas in front of a gallery owner, and that becomes your reputation.” The moment, borne from frustration with an unreasonable client, lives in infamy. But, in the vast scope of his ongoing legacy, it’s a mere footnote in a decades-long career.

The works in his studio are masterpieces of abstraction, figuration, and chromatic brilliance. Contradictions thrive: sculptures of epoxy carry the weight of bronze or marble, half-finished canvases resist resolution, and frames push beyond the canvas to extend the story. A chair salvaged from a Pan-Am hangar leans just enough into a rebellion of design to invite conversation. Once meant for military precision, its paint is no longer regulation. It now bears camouflage reimagined in absurd, misshapen patterns, half uniform and half subversion, serving as both homage to its utilitarian past and a satirical protest against its legacy.

Cundín is as much a storyteller as he is a painter. His tales spill effortlessly and are told with humor and the kind of clarity only age, and unflinching observation, can offer. His stories span his early years in Europe and New York, of avant-garde gatherings, of friendships with Southern legends, and of brushes with icons.

Among these, there is a fabled Salvador Dalí story. In the early sixties, broke but inspired and living in New York City, Cundín and his friend, the writer Victor Fuentes, dreamt of staging a puppet show based on playwright and poet Federico García Lorca’s poetry, aimed at underserved Spanish-speaking neighborhoods in New York. Their vision was pure and their intent sincere, but they ran out of money.

They then heard that Dalí—wealthy, eccentric, and a fellow Spaniard who had already reached worldwide acclaim—was in town. They decided to turn to him for help. After Cundín prepared to camp out for as long as needed, a doorman took pity on him, tipping him off that Dalí’s car was on its way. When Cundín finally intercepted him on the sidewalk outside the St. Regis, Dalí dismissed him with a sneer and a sharp insult in their native dialect. Little did Dalí know, the young man in his way would follow suit in international acclaim.

“It was a shame,” Cundín says, without bitterness. Brilliance without generosity, he believes now, is hollow. The memory remains a reminder of what art can lose when ego eclipses vision. The rejection only crystallized his conviction. In his eighties, he still plans to bring the puppet show to life, perhaps needed now more than it was then.

Even at this age, Cundín’s brush remains as steady as that of any old master, his touch undiminished by time. The paintings reveal a singular marriage of intellectual playfulness and painterly sophistication—moving with a logic both architectural and organic.

Even at this age, Cundín’s brush remains as steady as that of any old master, his touch undiminished by time. The paintings reveal a singular marriage of intellectual playfulness and painterly sophistication—moving with a logic both architectural and organic: forms behave according to the space around them while carrying their own interior pulse. Cundín calls this style ‘plasticity,’ a living responsiveness, where crowding forms become a single figurative entity and concave surfaces shift perspective. There is a balance of precise, almost engineered, arrangement of form with a chromatic freedom that feels improvisational, like jazz rendered in oil and pigment.

The pigments are hand-mixed, and radiate with precision and emotion. Brilliant color interacts with intricate brushwork, drawing the viewer close from across the room. His current series, defined by pastel and jewel-toned fragments—stacked, scattered, and interlocked—speaks to his fascination with structure. Their softened edges and luminous harmonies suggest a deep appreciation and understanding of the importance of color itself.

Cundín often frames his abstractions with language, where the painted inscription functions as both a wry literary reference and a clue to the true subject of the painting, pulling the viewer into a layered conversation about meaning, absurdity, and the act of looking. His paintings resist literalism or realism, instead offering a visual that is at once cerebral and playful, rigorous and lyrical—rooted in the traditions of modernist abstraction, but animated by his idiosyncratic wit. To step into his world is to be reminded that art can be both a vessel for ideas and a playground for the senses—equal parts beautiful and thought-provoking.

Having lived in Louisiana for over seven decades, Cundín finds in its landscapes, histories, and characters an endless stage. He’s reimagined its swamps with pyramids and triumphal arches, rendered its dreamlike ecosystems, and painted its characters—from preachers and Elvis impersonators, to politicians and the fictitious recurring Rosita Camargo. The satirical Southern belle dominated his works in the sixties and seventies, something of a muse who floated through his paintings with both poise and irony.

But beneath the whimsy—Darwinian ducks, triangular ukuleles, Fabergé egg homages—lies something deeper. A sharp political awareness threads through Cundín’s work. His art is as likely to speak in the language of humor as it is to confront history head-on, but the throughline is always precision of thought and the belief that objects can carry meaning layered like paint: a plywood alternative critiquing the now defunct monument to the Battle of Liberty Place years ahead of its time, a chicken coop filled with eggs as a metaphor for predestination, an editioned engraving of the Declaration of Independence on handmade Basque paper. Along the frame of an abstract figuration portrait of his favorite Basque philosopher, exiled by a corrupt government, reads in Spanish, roughly translated “Don Miguel de Unamuno Y Jugo vacations alone in the Canary Islands nude.”

[Read another "Perspectives" piece about New Orleans artist Emma Fick.] 

For Cundín, art is not merely expression; it’s intervention. It’s the divine spark. “We make something that was not there before. Out of nothing,” he says. “And what is that, if not playing God?” 

josemariacundin.com.