An 'Action Painting' Is Created in Real Time at BMCC, a 9/11 Remembrance

Cristobal Gabarron watches Justin Cabrillos perform. The painter drew inspiration from the dancer and other performers and speakers during his "action painting" on the third-floor plaza of BMCC. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Spanish artist Cristobal Gabarron [1] stood silently at one end of a blank, 29-foot-long canvas, and with hand on chin, awaited inspiration. This was no moment of reflection in the solitude of a studio, but the beginning of creation on the third-floor plaza of Borough of Manhattan Community College, in front of an audience that had come to watch the painter bring his mural to life.

Video by Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

It was Sunday, Sept. 11, and to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the attacks, Gabarron, 77, was invited to execute what he calls a “happening, performance and action painting,” inspired by both the events of 9/11 and a series of related readings, music, and dance performances by BMCC faculty and students as he worked, tuned into the performers and speakers.

“Action painting starts by listening,” Gabarron said. “I listen to the speeches, the politicians, the academics, the writers, the poets and the choir.” A speaker mentions the 9/11 ashes and it is translated into splashes of grey and green above two vertical strokes of blue that are the towers. Someone else recalls the story of a couple who met as they fled on that day and 21 years later are still together. On the canvas, they are intersecting ovals, one blue, the other green. From the depths of the charcoal-rendered Memorial pool, spots of color—the souls of the lost—float across the canvas towards flowers of remembrance.

This was the fourth event of what Gabarron calls “Ambit Five Continents [2],” organized by the Gabarron Foundation [3], in which he stages  his action paintings while inspired by other artists, in locations around the world that he considers significant. By the time he had finished this latest piece, more than four hours after he began, the official program had long since ended and the plaza was dark. Most everyone but those who assisted him were gone.

“When I do a project like this, you can’t see it but I have a lot of nervous tension,” Gabarron said in an interview the next day. “I have a lot of challenges, like timing, and [losing] the light. I was very worried about the lighting.”

But once the painting was complete, he added, all that pressure was released, so much so that he could barely move. Then came a dopamine rush. “I was excited,” he said, “and very happy.”