The Strange Pleasure of the Inhospitable
By Liannys Lisset Peña Rodríguez
Eugenio Trías, in “La memoria perdida de las cosas”, argues that this world likes to hide itself from our eyes and silence itself from our ears; and that to do so it relies on the experience of absence. He argues that it is in this remoteness from the real world that he can open himself to a more lucid understanding of it. Leodan García’s landscapes emerge in that detachment, which Trías cites, in the vision that derives from the collapse and reveals the void. They appear as that condition and limit of the beautiful that Schelling called das unheimlich: the sinister that has not been unveiled and encrypts its magic, mystery or fascination, as opposed to its capacity for suggestion and rapture1.
The fragile experience of drawing is the formula for representing an entropic (neo)landscape, an expanded field of the Smithsonian concept. A structure that exposes utopian territories, as that dimension of the unsettling is nothing more than the (in)ability to confront the real.
The image is born after the movement of the hand. Action that begins in a raptus, sudden discharge, initial stroke only recognizable by the artist. The line uncovers; it cuts the paper, that place destined to receive the effects of his aggression. This is not unforeseen, he conceives it immaterialized; but like any process, the drawing is exposed to shocks. Even when it is affirmed in each gesture, the form, on the contrary, is discovered as a discovery.
The silhouette in charcoal marks the beginning of a long journey; this action involves the whole of his body; the artist feels with intensity the displacements that the hand executes and the mind, before, has glimpsed. In the process “everything” is extracted and materialized, in the face of the danger of ruin and oblivion. His lines flow; they create clear territories, profiles, traces that do not stop in their imperious exploration and discovery of the surface. Leodan surrenders himself to the “slow” pleasure of drawing, to delve into the nebulous terrain of memory. In this search for spatial experience, the artist overflows the images through his hands, only with the condition ofself-imposed reductio, which implies the exclusive use of black color.
It is in the absence of the human, where the Barthean punctum of the image is established, it does not exist but its presence fixes an ellipsis, an allusion; giving way to that zone of crisis that Peter Burke insists happens when what is seen does not coincide with what is fixed on the surface.
The nomadism in the scenes –that not belonging anywhere-, propose an erratic experience, the suggestion of the inhospitable with the appearance of cosmic images, immovable and impassable surfaces. Representation of spaces, as an inquiry into the experience and intimate modality of the self.
When Leodan García draws, he discovers. He does it from memory, but he does not need to delve into it until he finds the content of his own observations, they emerge as in an autobiographical document, which gives an account of an event that has been remembered. It is a genre of the private that is related to the subconscious and the needs of the artist and requires the viewer to identify with him, to observe through his eyes the blank surface, like an empty space.
The paintings of this artist invite to mutism. As Rilke explained to his disciples, he needs to create in solitude, that which nourishes and whispers. The drawings are born from this “looking inward”; in a controlled, difficult act of signs and silences. Personal strokes like annotations in a logbook. An intimate diary, a sort of invasive violence of the surface.
The textures function as a kind of calligraphy; a language that confers plasticity to the rocky, arid surfaces. For its conception, the artist resorts to a taxonomy of materials: pencil, charcoal, graphite. He uses scratches, fading, shading, as elements ready for subjective evaluation and the achievement of a very personal grammar of form. To understand them it would be necessary to write with a draftsman’s hand; to look with the intention of discovering, to value each one of his strokes as an unequivocal trace; to assume them as an enigma before our eyes. Each one has that ambiguous nature, whose spatiality is its own and irreducible and are articulated as an infinite unfolding of possible concatenations.
Drawing is everything, says Giacometti. It is poetry; pure poetry; an end and a means at the same time, said Paul Valery. For Juan José Gómez Molina it is a controlled and difficult act of evocations and silences; established through the presence of signs. Leodan defines it as a definitive act of freedom.
There are certain ways of drawing, Rilke said, that are given by life experience. The works emerge as formalization of a chaos, that only uncertainties give rise to creation. That is why Leodan García’s images are looked at with the hope of discovering a secret, not about them, but about life, and even when you think you discover it, it will remain so, because it is almost impossible to translate it into words; with them the only thing I can do is to trace by hand, points like a map that points to the edge of that inexplicable, which only exists when perceiving that strange pleasure of the inhospitable.
1 Trías, Eugenio. The Beautiful and the Sinister. Penguin Rhandom House, Barcelona, 2006, p.33.
