Introduction
Aron Goldberg
Fine Arts Gallery
California State University, Los Angeles
March 31 – April 24, 1975
The art of Ed Carrillo is of two beauties: the earthly and the celestial. In olden times he would have been called born of the god of painting, so absolutely certain are his intuitions of its material requirements. For him, nothing is ever forced or arbitrary, nothing done for effect or in defense of a theory. His work is full of unceasing surprise of color or shape, his composition is always perfect, the final harmony absolute.
He has always been true to these gifts, and they have never failed him, Every Carrillo painting is an avatar, as though each incarnation of image brings him closer to that mystic synthesis of spirit and matter we sense beneath our categorized and rounded off lives.
Perhaps it was in the doctrines of his Catholic upbringing that he first understood that the mystery of trans-substantiation was central to his feelings for life. It is certainly the basis of all art– the making flesh of the spirit. Through his work as an artist and as a spiritual seeker, he is always drawn toward that ecstatic potential concealed in the so called inert and limited.
He has evolved from the need to create fantasies to being able to receive the fantastic which is always present in daily life. This loving interchange makes him the true brother of everyone who seeks spiritual unfoldment. After seeing a Carrillo painting we can recognize in a sunset or a tree what he has seen in them. We are brought that much closer to him, but he, in discovering these qualities, has also come close to us. His art thus becomes a unifying force in the world. If we are able to follow him in his search for the true vision, like that of the Spanish and Mexican mystics, even though his language may seem strange at first, we will come closer to our own possibility of ecstatic fulfillment.