Double Nature

Galerie Seippel, Cologne
15 Mar – 1 Jun, 2019

The land of drawing and painting

“Nobody has ever done beauty. We can just create favorable or sublime circumstances for what, sometimes, can linger at home: an altar, fruits, a flame-. The rest is not in our hands. And the thing itself, which, uncontrollable, arises from the hands of a man, is like the eros of Socrates, is a daimon, is between God and man, is not even beautiful, but it is nothing but love of beauty and nothing but the desire for it.”

Rilke in «Auguste Rodin»

Just two notes on some concepts in this Rilke text:

For Socrates, Eros is the love of something: it is the love of beauty. Like all demons, it is an intermediary between men and gods, between mortal and immortal. He brings “to heaven the prayers and sacrifices of men” and relates “to men the orders of the gods and the reribuition of the sacrifices they have offered them”.

The Greeks called that distant voice within us, that higher source of inspiration and enlightenment, a person’s daimon.

Looking for that daimon, that special voice, may be one of the tasks that accompanies the artist during is working life.

To play with the tip of a spatula on the simple surface of the canvas produces the first patches of what could be a painting. There are no ideas, no projects. Only the scratching of a scratching material on a surface that accepts it. It all starts like this. Ideas come up as we look at the density of the visual field. A painting is not for me a form of design for other designs or elaborate developments. Its structure arises from the very act of making even when I had previously thought about a certain object or objective.

In this exhibition are presented different series of works. But why do I call them series? Because there are formal and conceptual aspects that determine their organization into groups.

What happens is that in the practice of painting certain gestures and ideas continue every time we take on a new white canvas before us.

Painting has always to do with representation even if it is not recognizable as such. And eventually it could never be considered as representing someone or something in its literal sense. Representation arises at the moment a fact is created: a surface in which a situation happens, and it depended on a gesture that grabbed a thought, that only arose or become to being, because that gesture was made. The painting as a drawing, or a sculpture, a video or any other means man invented to re-elaborate what his eyes continue seeing, the painting I was saying, poses a statement and a question: “I am here” and “why am I here? »