MENTAL PICTURES

José Jiménez

 

        

Figures in the mirror


Who am I? asks the artist, fascinated by his constantly mutating reflection in the mirror, trying to fix on a feature, a sign at least, of a figure ­his own­ which flows like water. Who am I? the question echoes back inside the spectator's head as he ventures into the oscillating and changing forms of a work layered with registers, which speaks to him both of himself and of the world he lives in, but which constantly dispels the illusion of likeness, the supposed stability of the 'real' and its representation. The answer is in the light.

The answer is in the light. Light has no stable form or definite shape because it is a fluid; it is not a being but a becoming. And yet in light we find the quintessence of Western artistic tradition, from its remote origins in Classical Antiquity to the present day. Light is the field of representation, the thing which enables us to become aware: to see the divergence, or gap, between experience and artistic forms.

In other words, nothing is as it seems. Or still: what seems is not. Hence the reason why ever since the advent of philosophy, since Plato, light has been associated with beauty, and its radiation from the supra-celestial place where, Plato believed, 'idea-forms' lie, is what enables the world of the senses to be one of forms, shaped by the reverberation of light in it, issued from the distant and elusive source of all light.

One need not share Plato's idealism to grasp the import and the validity of what his philosophy set down: what seems is not. The distinction between being and seeming is the axis of philosophy, but in this distinction lies also the origin of an enquiry into appearances using forms, visual representations, as we have come to call art. Thus the artist's enquiry into light entails both a experimental dimension ­of a manipulation through the senses of life's materials­ and a cognitive dimension, as we come to understand that in this world nothing is as it seems and what seems is not. The artist's investigation into light, his desire to attain it, ride its waves or immerse himself in them until he finds the source from where it emanates in fact constitutes a process of disbelieving the manifest; a desire to uncover the lost path in the tortuous labyrinth of experience.

These are the questions that as a result of my conversations with Din Matamoro have provided the guiding thread in the conception of exhibition mounted in the CGAC. Who am I? What is the nature of things?, those we see in everyday life and those that come to exist through the art piece. The title of the exhibition, Mental Pictures, not only refers to the works shown but also to a points to a hypothetical answer to questions they trigger: both self and things are pictures, constructs of the senses, which allow us to fix or delimit the fluid, that which has the character of becoming. But there is more: the adjective 'mental' highlights the element of cohesion in Matamoro's career. The free-flowing imagination and the mental process of distancing himself from appearances are recurrent themes in the artist's work, and have remained with him despite his experiments with different styles, media, and techniques.

All the works in the exhibition but one are new; that is, they were conceived and executed expressly for this show. Even so, they do help to put a perspective on Matamoro's career and reveal his achievements, which can be appreciated in the maturity of his expression. The journey through Mental Pictures is like an artistic mirror which 'unfolds' as the visit progresses. After the initial questions Who am I? and What is the nature of things? we encounter the light; a diffuse light, as the ambit of life and experience, the root of forms; the light that gives meaning and structure to the artistic process.

The starting point is a group of self-portraits entitled Who am I? which, from the perspective of painting and photography, lead us into the mirror. Then there are the photographs of forms made from foam; subtle and transient forms, slight expressions of the ephemeral though fixed in the field of light. The cinema sketches Matamoro executed while seated in a darkened movie theatre, letting his hand move freely while he kept his eyes on the screen. Then there are photographs of shapes he made by hand out of plastic bags and masking tape, in an exercise which consisted of joining together the pieces of experience through materials that are normally only functional and therefore not noticed. In short, the film shows us how the plastic bag comes to life as a white rabbit, thereby questioning our static understanding of objects and their representation.

And so we arrive at painting. Din Matamoro is essentially a painter. For him, painting is a field of light, a space in which forms can germinate. His large-scale paintings contain an expressive warmth that leads us directly into a blinding brilliance, to the intense white of representation, in which it is impossible to see anything if there is nothing that contrasts with it, if there are no lines or blocks of colour marking an outline. But Matamoro's work is pictorial at a time when technology is expanding, and this is what makes him a painter of the present. His concept of painting grew out of a desire to inject poetry back into contemporary pictorial art, photography and particularly film. The dark cinema auditorium would be like a kind of box of reverberation, the waves of which would expand and develop along the artist's proposals.

Mental Pictures: a painter who uses a wide range of media, because Din Matamoro is a poet-artist of forms, a reveur of visual fantasies, who converts into an artistic proposal seemingly insignificant details or aspects of everyday life or man's relationship with nature. Mental Pictures: in an allusion to the mental dimension of a kind of art work which, through its connection with the sensitive, material aspect of the picture refers to the inner constructive field of the artistic concept, which Renaissance Classicists termed dissegno, meaning both drawing (artistic expression) and design (plan).

Who am I? What is the nature of things? Figures in the representational space, fleeting traces of life and experience which barely attain a time, a moment of fixedness: the aesthetic instant, in the universe of the picture, in the reverberation of art. Figures in the mirror.


The dreamer's gaze

The dreamer's gaze moves in the half-light of everyday life, forever trying to reach the zenith of his reverie. When the dreamer is also an artist, his eyes awaken him to the revelation of forms, the signs of vision which a superficial glance is unable to discover. Reverie and revelation are the two great axes of Din Matamoro's work, who has said, "You're the one who distinguishes a form in your mind, who sees in a cloud a bird". One of his works, which he made while in New York, in 1988, is entitled, "This Cloud is a Rabbit".

The reveur always remains outside the game, as if he were absent. He carries the sign of difference, which Din Matamoro first felt when he was a child. A lonely boy at school, he would stand huddled next to the radiator "feeling like a Martian with the blood of an alien, not understood". But the dreamy artist is also carried by an upward movement, and draws on his feeling different to construct and to give thrust forms.

Being the good Galician that he is, Din Matamoro has made of his life a journey of a constant return to the source. Galicia, Madrid, New York, Rome, Madrid, Galicia. His is a nomadic understanding of life which has profoundly marked the ever-changing, metamorphic character of his work, and made it permeable and in constant transformation. It can only be understood as the exteriorisation of the artist's lifelong search for his dream world. Everything he does is in pursuit of the visualisation, the echo, the resonance, of his own inner journey.

His beginnings as an artist in the 1980s were steeped in an expressionist language of well-defined forms and intense, aggressive colours. During his stay in New York, he was exposed to other existing forms and images, and to the icons characteristic of American popular culture, which he set about subverting through humour and irony. Later, on another step of the journey, in Rome, he turned his attention to the detention of time by overlaying marks and registers on walls and stage sets like old scars.

Animals,and pets are a constant in his 'journey': cats, birds, donkeys, horses and, in particular, hares. It would be wrong to associate them with the rural milieu. On the contrary, they are meant as symbols of human transience, as signs of childhood fantasies and affections. They are like a kind of gallery of friends and favourite characters, like a class photograph; a series of portraits of imaginary beings that are half human, half hare.

Din Matamoro is essentially a painter and a fine drawer. But on his journey into the depths of himself he discovered that cinema and cinematographic imagination particularly played a central role. After returning to Madrid, he began, in 1992, a series called "Pantallas" (Screens) in allusion to a text by Ingmar Bergman called "The Magic Lantern": "Light _ soft, dangerous, oneiric, alive, dead, clear, hazy, warm, violent, cold, sudden, dark, spring-like, vertical, linear, oblique, sensual, subdued, confining, calm, venomous, luminous. Light."

His paintings are receptacles of a diffuse, translucent luminosity, devoid of any object, like the light given off by cinema screens. His aim is to seize light at its most intense and pure, and exploit its changing character to give visual form to all things. Like the colours used in publicity and pop art, Matamoro drains the acrylic colours of their harshness until they are almost transparent, reminiscent of the light that bathes and diffuses things without having any particular form.

Whilst working on "Pantallas", he began another series of interventions on film stills, called "Autorretratos" (Self-Portraits). Here he superimposed images of his own face on that of Buster Keaton; 'acted' alongside Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers as an extra; turned into Peter Pan, or one of the dwarves accompanying Snow White, just as they appear in Walt Disney's films. Playing. Getting into the story. Returning to childhood, recovering childhood, feeling the elusive touch of magic which the pensive child first felt in the darkened room of the local cinema.

As Din Matamoro has noted, this as yet unfinished series cultivates a traditional genre in the history of painting ­the self-portrait­ but in a more contemporary way: "I try to approach the cinema actively, not passively, to step into the screen, into the film". Furthermore, the self-portrait implies a degree of metamorphosis, or disguise, which cloaks the artist's quest for omnipotence, his desire to be, through artistic illusion, any character he wishes.

Now he is back in Galicia, Din Matamoro continues to be surprised by light, and uses more filtered, diffuse colours to evoke fragments of absent photographic impressions produced by the illusion of the acrylic. His fascination for the sky, the shapes of the clouds, the masses of light, has become the gravitational centre of both his camera and canvas. This has resulted in vaporous forms which are very difficult to reproduce in other media. Sometimes he inscribes phrases onto the paintings or photographs in large letters: SOLO, LLUVIA (Alone, Rain) or NO VEO (I can't see), which is completed in the title of the piece: NO VEO UN CIELO DESDE NIÑO (I haven't seen the sky since I was a child).

In his more recent paintings he has dispensed with inscriprions, preferring a bareness that aspires to freeze time, detain its passing, by appropriating light and shaping it into the most capricious of forms. As Matamoro explains, his aim is to "uncover the essence, seize the brilliance, the air, the luminosity; to reach the inner colour, like when we read a musical score and 'hear' the music even though it isn't being played. It's about the inner colour". Time wears on, the dream becomes more and more nostalgic.

Not only his paintings, but also his words reflect the light this dreamer-artist carries inside him. He has said about art, "It's like light ­ something you can escape into from the horror, from your surroundings". Art to dream, to learn to see again, to explore beyond the surface of things. To see, with admiration and surprise, the cloud which is a bird or a rabbit, the marvellous animal from our childhood stories to which we would so like to return.

The Haste of the White Rabbit


"Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" exclaims the white rabbit at the start of the magical story of Alice in Wonderland. As Alice continues her journey, growing as she shrinks, falling as she picks herself up, finding herself between the familiar and the bizarre, the white rabbit, the keeper of her secret, is present throughout. Are we really sure that anything quite so pompous-sounding as 'reality' actually exists?

The figure of Alice provides the clearest sign of the notion that living beings, as much as 'things', rather than being, in fact become. The universe as a whole is is change, transformation. The idea of immutable permanency, of permanent identity, can only be associated with the absolute, or with a god, if you believe in this kind of thing. But not with life, with this inevitably fleeting passage of beings and situations.

In the figure of Alice we find a particularly clear sign of the changing nature of existence, precisely because childhood is, above all, change, continuous growth and transformation. Compared to the apparent (only apparent) and relative 'stability' of adulthood, childhood is a rapid and almost vertiginous process of psychical and physical change.

The story of Alice not only takes us into Wonderland, to the other side of reality, to the other side of what our psychical projection constitutes as a mirror. More than anything else, the story of Alice is a poetic transposition of a nightmare, of the kind of anxiety-ridden dream so common in childhood, in which you fall and fall and can't find anywhere to grab onto, any foothold to stop your fall. Your endless fall. Your endless fall down the white rabbit's hole.

Din Matamoro's career has much in common with the white rabbit's endless comings and goings, and indeed there seems to be something of a connection between the two, as Din Matamoro recalls: "One Hallowe'en, I dressed up as a white rabbit". The fancy-dress, the desire to be someone ­or something­ else, reveals the artist's desire for omnipotence, to shape 'reality' through an image, through fantasy, and is at the core of the artist's dream. In Din Matamoro's case, the predominance of fantasy is so strong that it has led him to introspection, to keep the material world at arm's length, and search for his subjective essence within himself, which early theories of Classical art associated with melancholy.

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Din Matamoro is something of a melancholic himself. A melancholic of light. This is why he seeks, through art, the omnipotence of the magician, and why he dresses up as a white rabbit, or as Mandrake the Magician of the comic strip story. It's what enables him to float in the sky. Or speak the language of butterflies. Or run like the wind round the bends and curves of animism and commune with the sea, the clouds, the leaves (transformed into 'little people'), and the rain: all of them, people, shapes and figures, are animate.

Painting thus becomes a struggle for light, a quest to break the flat shadows that bind living beings and things to darkness, to create a field of splendour. A luminous, autonomous, mental and sensitive space in which shapes and meanings are revealed and colour conveys the most precise and exact definition of things: "the Pantheon is amber and the Piazza Navona, white".

But, clearly, the melancholy of light is most intensely mirrored in the brilliance of the sun which, like the painter, makes colour and life materialise on the canvas of nature. This is why the melancholic holds daily "meetings with the sun", which finish when it sets, "when its colours bleed into the water and it sinks into the sea".

The workshop, the studio, is a "battle ground". But also a "time hole". Because the light which we want to restore to our gaze is not only the immediate light of the present. All the floating vaporous shapes and the artistic spaces that compose it reveal in Din Matamoro's drawings, photographs and paintings the subtle density of recovered time, of a long and unhurried incursion into the spirals of memory.

Memory is full of holes, of empty spots, but also of streams of intensity, of sparks which Din Matamoro ignites in his works, to order their random journeys in space into a ring of cities of memory: Vigo, Madrid, New York, Rome, Vigo. To live is to relive. And the function of memory is to serve as a filter that eliminates the lies of certainty from forms. The intention is to gauge the exact framing point of light, to fix the point where light lingers in exposure time, thus injecting shapes with life and colour.

But to remember is not simply to go back on something. A creative use of memory implies a leap: the appropriation of experience to make it shine in the light of the nuance, in the contrast of what ebbs away and what remains. As Marcel Proust observed, when our sensitivity penetrates the inroads of memory, it not only seeks but creates: "It finds itself before something which has yet to exist and which only it can make real and bring into the field of its vision".

Although the associations are unintended, the act of recovering involves a modulation of the memory, rather like the transformation of sound in music, of the flow of language in literature, or the treatment of lines, colours and space in art. Not for nothing did the Ancients consider Mnemosyne ­memory­ the mother of the Muses.

Din Matamoro's melancholy eye finds in the twisted folds of memory the material for his art, the door to his quest for future light. His art is not complacent, not just illustrative; it is an anagram of his imagination, evidence of 'another' reality, of a world germinating in our innermost self, in which we can float like clouds or, like the sun, project our light rays on the swollen and, at times, choppy waters of an incommensurable sea.

Along this same undulating line of memory one finds another aspect that shapes the fantasy world of Din Matamoro. For light to be fixed in all its reverberation it is necessary to descend into the utmost darkness. And here lies the question: to sink into the darkness from which light may emanate, the present-day melancholic seeks refuge in the cinema. His paintings are also screens.

Without this magical box of resonance the artist has found in the darkened rooms of the cinema, without the incessant blinking of the projector and the all-enveloping light of the screen, Din Matamoro's work would have none of its characteristic intensity. The photographic is also present in his work, as I suggested earlier, for his paintings and drawings betray a search for the exact framing point. But the dynamics of the image and the diffuse light come almost directly from filmic reverie.

In films, in the rapid succession of moving stills, the white rabbit's mechanical eye tries to appropriate the emerging figures and colours, the exact precision, the all-enveloping light. It is an appropriation which will later be reemployed in the quest for form, in the infinite exercise of painting.

By now we may comprehend better the nature of the rabbit's haste: he means to seize the light, compelled as he is by the very human need to vanquish time. Hurry, hurry, before the inevitable fugacity of life fetters the introspection of search.

In all human cultures the representation of animals has a key, symbolic role: their images serve to sift experience, establish values and codes of conduct, to talk to humans about life and death. Their presence in cartoons today refers to ancestral filiations, fables and allegories; to traditional stories, and from here to totemism, myths and rituals, and such symbolism percolates into the artist' creative imaginary.

Lewis Carroll's white rabbit, forever coming and going and in a terrible rush, utterly enslaved by that diabolic invention of modern living which is the pocket watch, is a symbolic mark or figure of the future, a kind of 'master of ceremonies' of the passage from one stage of life to another, like the assistants of the rites of passage. Like the rabbit-bag which comes to life in Din Matamoro's film and flits about before our imagination's eye, just like these pictures: fast and fleeting, barely glimpsed, before they vanish.

What a hurry! Light escapes. Will the white rabbit, or rather, Din Matamoro, succeed in capturing light in his twinkling screen: film, photography, drawing, painting? The fight is on. The Queen of Heart must be stopped from chopping our heads off. But for this, nothing better than magic, in which Mandrake and the rabbit are real experts: the painter giving form and consistency, air and colour, to this short-lived journey in which, awe-struck, we presence the projection that the Sun makes of a film which sometimes we call nature and sometimes we call, simply, life. The answer is in the light.

 

 

Volver a Exposiciones

Volver arriba

Atrás Inicio Adelante