SEVERO SARDUY (1937-1993): AN ART OF THE HYPERTELIC

Abstract

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive art-historical study of the painting practice of Severo Sarduy (1937–1993), the Cuban writer and critic best known for his literary work and theorization of the Neo-Baroque. Through sustained formal and contextual analysis of nearly sixty works produced between 1965 and 1993, it demonstrates that painting was not an ancillary activity but a central and generative component of Sarduy’s intellectual project. Repositioning Sarduy within transnational postwar debates across Latin America, Europe, and the United States, the dissertation reconstructs the major phases of his artistic production and situates key series of works in dialogue with his art criticism. It argues that Sarduy’s visual practice intervenes in postwar discussions of abstraction and the legacies of modernism, addressing questions of autonomy and instrumentality, materiality and dematerialization, and authorship and influence. Developed outside academic training and institutional frameworks, his paintings engage international artistic currents while critically reworking modernism’s binary logics of center and margin, politics and aesthetics, and structure and excess. At the core of the dissertation is the concept of the hypertelic—drawn from José Lezama Lima and mobilized in Sarduy’s own creative and critical practice—which describes a condition in which form exceeds both function and completion. In Sarduy’s paintings, hypertelia emerges through chromatic saturation, compositional layering, grid and woven structures, and ornamental proliferation that resist transparency and interpretive closure. By foregrounding close visual analysis as a mode of critical inquiry, this study demonstrates that Sarduy’s paintings generate their own conceptual vocabulary, expanding how art history accounts for practices that traverse media, geographies, and discursive regimes. Ultimately, the dissertation integrates Sarduy’s visual work into global histories of postwar art and repositions him as an artist and theorist whose marginality functions as a critical vantage point rather than a condition of exclusion.