On The Spiritual (And Suspicion) In Art
By Marta Mariela
Contemporary art has reconciled many forms of existential thought: sublimating or annulling the entity, appealing to beauty or the grotesque, as the moment demands. Each work has concretized a reflection on our way of relating to the world and on the way we represent ourselves. Each work has been an invitation to explore new perspectives and paths, from suspicion, irreverence… For his part, in his freedom of expression, the contemporary artist forces us –or at least, he tries to- to face the complexity and uncertainty of life, its struggles and its questions. Often, his creations lead us to question our deepest values and beliefs, challenging us to see the world from different perspectives, producing feelings and self-discovery.
This is what I experience when I visit the works of Dayron Gallardo (Havana, 1986). With them in front of me, I go back to a point in the past; and likewise, I go to a place far away, in the future. Each canvas tastes of nostalgia, of rivers and lakes, of navigable seas, with or without storms. But the anguish is perceptible. That inevitable one of which Kierkegaard said increases with intelligence and spirituality, and arises while we are at the crossroads between what is and what could be, between what we are and what we could become. Anguish in Gallardo unleashes a feeling that leads to the interior of being, of the being beyond the accidental matter. It is the artist’s restlessness to understand culture in order to strip himself of it as much as possible and go –as a mystical experience- to meet Nature, true maker or master, waiting to be found. It is the anguish to understand and master the tradition of the genre, the landscape. For this reason, we find caves, semi-desert lands, common signs of the landscape to understand the horizon, the spatiality inside the painting. It is a concern, palpable in his previous works, in which he presented the microcosm –dissected the universe in small fragments-, and delivered it to us amplified. In those, the horizon can still be seen. On the other hand, in his latest pieces, although we see “somewhere” with rocks, mounds… we see the motifs suspended in the midst of an atmosphere; it is not a specific place, but what Gallardo calls mental landscapes or landscapes of intuition. That is why we often stumble upon somber environments, also with caverns, abysses, luminous precipices, in a spatial, mysterious atmosphere, with holes that emanate light.
Among the iconographic elements appear deformed, fragmented, enormous and excessively corpulent human beings, some with tiny heads. They are reminiscent of his characters in the series Yo no soy un animal (I Am Not An Animal). We find ourselves in front of Mijail Bakhtin’s “grotesque body”, due to its deformations and liberating function, expression of the repressed and marginalized; likewise, we observe figures that imitate
unicellular particles, similar to bacteria or viruses; or vulvas, in allusion to the ancestral cult to Mother Earth, giver. Others are seen falling or in suspension within this environment, others, completely demolished. And here the anguish returns, the self-management of the limit. This explains the fragment, the section, the transhumant piece, rushing towards the void. And, similarly, why in some pieces one feels the eroticism of the scene of a hyperbolic coitus, and the humidity of the inner breast. Some of this is saved by the redeeming light enunciated through the yellow.
Dayron Gallardo draws from two main sources: his own photographs and the music of Skyrim Atmospheres. The Elder Scrolls V, a video game of gloomy, fantastic and medievalist atmospheres. Both references, together with his own experiences, fit together in the painter’s mind as a longed-for and evocative place of the future. Music is essential for creation. It is the vehicle to channel the pain, the darkness or the anguish of wanting to live a reality in which he does not live; of contemplating a mental space. More than innovating, the artist is interested in understanding and contemplating this mental landscape. He aspires to disengage himself from cultural constructs, to abandon his “noises” and in a 180-degree turn direct his steps towards the transcendent, towards the ontological, towards silence.
All this can be seen in his most recent project within the Far Horizons series, a work in progress that he has been working on since 2016. Certain motifs are recurrent in his work, as part of his identity: the floating stone, guide on the path, emanation of the Earth; the ramifications, bearers of life, conductors of sap; the atmospheres, enveloping, overwhelming; the meanders, which connect with the traces of the past; the circles, metaphors of the goodness, power and beauty of Nature, or of that perfect mental space where all questions and images converge; the fragments, nods to the Greek statues battered by time, symbols of the break with culture and their suspicion of it.
The work of Dayron Gallardo translates the relationship between matter, painting, and spirit, music; ineffable embodiment of the divine, of the ungraspable. The process that gives rise to his work, is lived stoically by this artist; like the hero facing the dragon-culture, to save the maiden-Beauty, without the right to rest or the gift in exchange for faltering in his battles. With this he tries to reach that “other place”, genesic, where existence itself begins. A place of calm, of contemplation, where the human is naked, fused in the immeasurable Cosmos.
