TextsAbout Evolution series. From the catalog, Paco Dalmau, Evolution series 21-23. Solo show that took place at El Convent Espai d’Art in Vila-real (ES) from August 31 to October 28, 2023
Talking Abstraction Sjoerd Westbroek The paintings of Paco Dalmau have a radiant presence that affects the space around them and the mind of the beholder to an equal extent. The first work I saw for real, in a home gallery where we were both exhibiting, was so intensely blue that it made me involuntarily hear David Bowie sing “Blue, blue, electric blue / That’s the color of my room / Where I will live / Blue Blue”. Another one, in various shades of white, measuring a modest 40 by 40 centimeters, embraced the entire white wall it was hanging on. It is as if his pictures are made of pure color that wants to escape the limits of its material support. Their finish is smooth but mate, so you don’t see yourself or the surrounding space reflected in their surface. This contributes to the impression of color taking up space. It’s as if you witness a process of shapes being born out of some primordial soup behind the surface of the picture. The series is titled Evolution, so Dalmau explicitly hints at this notion of emergence too. There is something screen-like in how these shapes are made to appear in and through a smooth and physically impenetrable surface, as if they have a life of their own. Yet, a sense of control exercised by the artist remains tangible and counterbalances any illusion of transcendence the work might evoke. For me, this defines the virtuosity of the work. The hand of the painter is omnipresent. For instance, the uneven edges of the pictures, which could have been straightened quite easily, can be read as deliberately cultivated traces of their production. The way paint and resin are allowed to flow over the edge affirms the hand-made object hood of the works. Furthermore, the sensation of depth is produced by an actual depth, by layers of paint that are applied to the base and fixed using an epoxy resin, which is sanded to create the non-reflective surface. I am not just thinking I am looking at space, there actually is space. It’s like a suspension of disbelief turned inside out: what you’re willing to accept as an illusion turns out to be real. The works are made in series. When I visited Dalmau in his studio, I encountered a small production line, where new paintings in various stages of completion awaited next steps. As you would expect, they are made lying horizontally, with the surface facing up so that gravity forces the resin to flow out perfectly smoothly. Several dried works were hanging on the wall, so Dalmau could decide whether they needed another layer. There is also a more conceptual notion of seriality ingrained in each of the individual works, independent of the number of works that are actually made. Each work implies the possibility of another work, made within the same formal and technical constraints, that is nevertheless completely different. At the same time, it feels like the works are not satisfied with an existence merely as an idea. They want to be made, as a material object. In the end, the work seems to be not just about the possibility, but also the realization and an enjoyment of difference. This notion of a picture desiring something, the fulfillment of something that we see as independent of its maker, is the central concern in the book What Do Pictures Want? by art and media theorist W.J.T. Mitchell. In the chapter “Abstraction and Intimacy” he asks himself what has remained of abstract painting after modernism – after the novelty of abstraction has worn off and lives on beyond the expectations and ambitions of modernist artists and critics. Contemporary abstract painting has become a “vernacular artistic tradition”, something as common as figurative painting and accessible for artists and their public alike. Mitchell emphases how this gave abstract art a conversational potential, the beholder is looking at the work to let the work speak back. Contemporary abstraction holds the possibility of a conversation between work and beholder, and amongst beholders. So, the simple answer to the question “what does abstract painting want?” would be: to be talked about. Thus, abstraction is not any more about the modernist quest to find the essence of painting qua painting, but rather just an aspect of a wide variety of practices, each articulating an idiosyncratic relationship to the history of painting, whilst remaining firmly rooted in the present. The particularity of a painterly position, articulated in a vernacular, is what makes it relatable, allowing a conversation to unfold. Mitchell sees abstract painting “as a training ground in the practice of prolonged visual concentration on singular, determinate complexes of visual imagery, discursive association, and concrete objecthood”. Patience is needed, a concentration that is not always readily available and that requires practice. I’d say in that sense “discursive association” is not an end in itself, but rather the active exploration of how meaning forms in conversation, how meaning is always both personal and social. The work of Dalmau seemed at place in the domestic setting where I first encountered it. This is, of course, not to say that the paintings couldn’t be shown in a gallery or a museum. The domestic setting just helped in facilitating some sort of lingering in a situation that enveloped the work and its beholders. Thinking of Mitchell, intimacy is perhaps another thing the work wants. Intimacy allows personal preferences to be played out in the situation where the work is shown. It invites contemplation, not only about what you find interesting, but also what work you could live with. I couldn’t resist the temptation to pick a favorite –obviously the blue one, because of Bowie– and discuss this with others, who held equally personal reasons for preferring one over the other. In that sense intimacy can be about taste, the things you like and love, as something that can hold equal importance as formal or conceptual considerations. At the same time, I believe discussing these matters of taste should not exclude a thorough exploration of how the formal qualities of a painting work, the invitation it sets up in the shared space of an exhibition. This leads to a fascinating question: to what extent do you allow taste and other personal considerations to play a role in the evaluation of what pictures can do? Can the two even be separated? Because of the conversational nature of an exhibition, the aim is not to settle this once and for all. Any conclusion is a provisional one. All these questions around where the work takes you and what you bring to work, the reciprocal relations that are established, merge through the colored shapes of the pictures – perhaps with the main purpose of finding a space to share.
The Phenomenon of a Profound Image, mere Painting Ricardo Forriols Do not search beyond phenomena, for theory lies in fact within them.
1 Note the phenomena: the depth of a transparency, the perception of an effect, the silky touch of light and space, a natural and free evolution of colors and shapes… We behold a succession of artworks showing organic, shapeless contours that seem to move in a sort of albumin or active magma, where each piece is only a sample -like laminated and prepared cuttings sandwiched in glass slides for scientific microscopic testing. 2 Precisely what we see takes us to the workshop of the lens polisher Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in the Dutch city of Delft, so close in space and time to the studio of painter Johannes Vermeer[1]. Travelling in the speed of light to the end of the 17th century, we witness an amazing time when a drop of water was first ever observed through a lens, revealing an invisible, microscopic “new world” full of unheard-of living creatures, equally fantastic and impossible, perhaps shapeless. On just an ordinary day in August 1674 in Delft, Leeuwenhoek’s gaze was fascinated by the vibrant activity of all this minuscule life encountered for the first time -his eyes zooming into the calibrated tube containing one of the first magnifying lenses. A fascinated gaze… This discovery of seeing for the first time was just a question of distance. As Maurice Blanchot so well explained it: “Why such fascination? Seeing implies distance, the separating decision, the power to prevent contact and avoid confusion derived from contact. Nevertheless, to see means that such separation has become an encounter. And still, what happens when what we see, even at a distance, seems to touch us by an astonishing contact? When the way to see is a kind of tap? And when what you see imposes over your glance, as if it were touched, taken, and put in contact with the appearance? Not as an active contact -whatever initiative and action remains in a genuine touch- but rather as a drawn gaze, absorbed by a motionless movement against a background lacking any depth. Image is what we get from having contact at a distance. And fascination is a passion for images.”[2] Think of that wide-eyed stare, Leeuwenhoek’s fascinated gaze, his whole brain and nerves mesmerized by the image and the world opening right in front of him through lens and light reaching from the other end of the tube, seeming to point so far away despite being at such short distance, and drowning in the so far unfathomable layers of the minuscule amount of fluid contained in a drop. 3 In the same way, we can mesmerizingly look at the distance between Paco Dalmau’s artwork and us. We can glance directly at the core of his paintings to discover the medium way beyond the mere image: the painting as an absolute medium (perceived in all its splendor), as a substance turning into an image confined within a shape, its own shape, as an image seemingly containing life in the same space occupied by it, in the possible profile of its own apparent depth. Nonetheless, one should not forget that looking at the paintings in such a way presupposes having contact at a distance -as Blanchot would say- through a drawn look, absorbed towards a possible background lacking depth. To look into the different layers of paint and into its interspaces is like looking inside the painting, towards its core. Looking in such a manner, glancing there, observing Paco Dalmau’s paintings is like focusing on an intervening, complex and at the same time almost impossible space, an area that exposes the sense of drama in the perspective systems and in the representation of nature as being the rules of deception, like in the paintings of realist tradition, i.e. mimesis: the delusion of a scenography trying to maintain a sense of believable yet unreal images. On the contrary, in the tradition of abstract art, this other fascinating profoundness indeed opening up in the paintings of Dalmau’s Evolution series -though thin, interestingly light- is real and generated by the navigation of layers of polished resin and color over layers of polished resin and color over layers of polished resin and color, and so forth. Rather than a sensation or an illusion, paintings worked in such way offer an effective and corporeal journey through that profusion of layers going from the surface to the core, and vice versa: from the upper layer all the way to the canvas, in a sort of depth with background -for it is more than the mere image Blanchot referred to. We come to understand the power of the veil and the strength of the substance becoming evident in itself: matter, time, abyss. The painting, its substance, is shown here just like the unheard-of, fantastic beings discovered by Leeuwenhoek through his own polished lens[3]. Looking. Practicing and looking at paintings in this way makes them become something very different from the representations in the theater of the world. And the painting becomes a kind of container pond. 4 While Leeuwenhoek observed life for the very first time in a drop of liquid, Vermeer inaugurated around the same time a new representation that relied on the use of the camera obscura to adjust forms in the space of a room. These figures, their frozen gestures and the robust furniture are all very plausible, but above all they unravel the secret of light -making possible his gaze and ours to the world- and its magical translation into color. By means of that optical mechanism, Vermeer’s clean gaze crosses the perspective of the distance to the image and, as if making that secret of light tremble in the air, he makes visible in his canvases a profound and hitherto abstract atmosphere, truly natural, divine, in line with a new visual texture for the theater of the world. As Calvo Serraller noted, this is how Vermeer atomized “the light that crests the color.”[4] This was happening more or less simultaneously from one end to the other, diagonally, on the Delft Market Square itself. Right at its center, the world was vibrating and the spire of the Nieuwe Kerk could do nothing but relay that slight but crucial (electrical) disturbance into the future. 5 During his walks and when reviewing the works of the Parisian Salon of 1846, a young Charles Baudelaire noted, when speaking of color and the symphonic character of painting -being nothing there: harmony, melody and musical counterpoint of color-, that “the best way to know whether a painting is melodious is to look at it from far enough away so as to neither understand the subject nor the lines”[5]. With small eyes and following Baudelaire’s infallible method, it was necessary to contemplate the painting at enough distance until the din of what was represented disappeared and its melody could be felt. Once again, we encounter the distance, as in that other trick to review the artwork on a painting, consisting of taking a step back with squinting eyes to better see the lace, without details, observing through that sort of veil formed by our eyelashes, a point of light that appears to organize the whole scene, the whole image. This to and fro movement of the zoom is the same Vermeer used to adjust the camera obscura lens to capture in detail the brilliant light magically wielding on the canvas, in a point, perhaps a pearl? Possibly Baudelaire also sensed in this way, in the distance, the moving vertigo of the very center of the universe giving order to everything. 6 In Rotterdam, 15 kilometers from Delft (and about 450 from Paris), Paco Dalmau has been working for the last two years on this series of paintings titled Evolution. In addition to the geographical and narrative distance, and to the distance that Blanchot mentioned for the image, it seems as if there were a mobile distance within each painting in the series. And each painting evolves autonomously between the overlayed layers of plastic fluid interwoven by the transparencies between resin and color, resin and color, and resin and color, and so forth, in a process of deposition, erosion and polishing of color that defines a certain “glazing” of the painting, impassable, hard. It is as if handling the pictorial matter was sharpening the prism so that when the light passes through, it shoots out and discovers the spectacle of color, which is something self-sufficient, in itself a force in the world, one of the forces that make the world, as we would say. Color is where light suffers and rejoices -as Goethe said-, it is the most sacred of the visible -as Ruskin said-; and it is the first or the second thing that adjectivizes the form of what we see. But, despite appearing to be hard, we insist, this is a painting that seems to be in the painting and in the world like water in water.[6] 7 On the shore of the pond of his house-workshop in Giverny -where he confined himself until his death in 1926, in his garden, in an inner exile, almost blind, with color hallucinations due to the cataracts in his eyes- we witness the scene of Claude Monet painting the profoundness above and below the surface of the water. We see him painting seated in his boat, in the middle of the pond right before dawn, before the sunlight rises and changes everything: “It occurred to him that the perfect balance between water and sky, between the real world and its mirror image, must be very much like sitting on the central axis of the universe, at the static point around which everything revolves. Yet at the same time he was aware of its fragility. Like being inside an aquamarine soap bubble that could disintegrate anytime. Just at that moment, his scrutinizing gaze noticed, at the point where the river converged not with the sky but with the reflection of its own shadow, a diffuse dark blue stain”.[7] Let us point out the perfect balance where the central axis of the universe emerges and that elusive, dark spot, halfway between reflection and shadow, which is nothing other than that vibrant point of detail for Vermeer. That spot, that dot is actually the singularity to which science often refers. And that same singularity is the one that denounces the complexity of space in perfect balance on the central axis of the universe in so many pictures painted in Giverny. Eva Figes described it very well: “The water lilies had begun to open, revealing to the sky, petal by petal, the complex variety of their colors. The shadow of the willow lost in entity as the sun gained in height, its light sifted by the web of those very long green fingers. Claude saw the first white cloud of the day crossing over the pond and he turned his gaze to the water to watch the water lilies floating in it, their white edges tinged slightly with mauve and blue. The large shadow of the willow partially obscured the setting and at the same time endowed it with perspective and depth. This was an effect that only occurred in still waters; one that had not yet been captured.”[8] That impossible and original effect was the light and the colors in movement. A movement of colored forms that Marcel Proust finely detailed: “Those inert hours of the afternoon when the river is white and blue from the clouds and the sky, and green from the trees and the grasses, and pink from the sun’s rays already lying on the trunks of the trees, and red from the illuminated darkness of the bushes in the gardens where the great dahlias grow”[9]. All these colors and more, all these things and reflections (images) coexisting on the surface of the pond, which is the surface of the painting, are, in essence, the surface of the painting. But let us pause for a moment to contemplate how, on the still plane of the water, disappearing into the water, images from above (flowers, trees, air, birds, Monet’s own reflection) and further above (clouds, blue sky, only appearing in the painting as a reflection) merge with elements from within (perhaps some floating pearlescent looking water lilies, clear waters and the creatures living in them) and from the depths (of the water, all the way to the bottom). It’s all about distances. This impossible, complex, irreal plane of the water runs through the point of reflection and enhances its darkness. It becomes increasingly complicated when, due to the transparency between reflection and light refraction, the shapes on either side, above and underneath, occur simultaneously and overlap on the same surface. Monet finally mastered such effect —surely becoming a master in his “landscapes of reflection”, as he liked to call them— by overdoing the painting’s surface when blowing it up and making it disappear. In the end, it is a matter of capturing the rare specular effect of a constellation in the image’s profoundness, in a flat surface perceived with a certain degree of fascination and sufficient distance. Possibly, such eye-deceiving effect that plays with perspective and optical illusion acquires then significant, cosmic echoes, as Figes pointed out, at the end of his approach one day to the house, gardens, and paintings of Monet: “The stars reflecting in the mirror of water upholds it: its light goes beyond life, death, and eternity”[10]. 8 In Dalmau’s artwork we also find somehow this transparency effect that allows us to delve into the painting all the way to the canvas, to the warp and woof of the fabric envisaged as the background texture. And it is on this texture that the lightest layers move: a paintbrush motion, a sanding mark; color coming to light while stains push each other and overlap… (It reverberates in the margins and over the corners of the painting, that supersedes them, contradicting flatness and superficiality. It is the tridimensional evidence where pouring resin drops upset gravity, against the wall, like flames and splatters, rather as a formless and undefined element defying any edges, perverting them and escaping.) … with a complete exercise of polishing that encapsulates all colors in a sort of strata documenting the process, the material substance, light and time. Everything becomes transparent: nuances, dimensions, view angles. And the painting keeps compacting. It compresses into some very contemporary colors, into vibrant and utterly luminous acrylic colors. These are more modern that the palette of pinks discovered by Baudelaire and loved by Proust, and even more than those end-of-the-century and fictitious colors —artificially manufactured, extracted from manipulating coal tar, such as the innovative (at the time), glamorous and depraved mauve— referred to by Théophile Gautier in his prologue to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. In Gautier’s view, those aniline-based colors, ever more compact and opaquer, pushed us away from transparent nature and generated new and unknown needs. The colors wielded by Paco Dalmau in every piece in the Evolution series seek a clean variety and create harmonies. In each painting —as described by Frank Stella— “he tries to maintain the same fine appearance as shown in the paint bucket”[11] when unsealing and opening it. The emotion of first laying eyes on the pristine color is conveyed to the viewer. This trace of pleasure reaches us from the soft forms of a melodious color scheme —in words of Baudelaire— that keep interacting in its square, ever square container, and forcing us to deal with our own sensations while exploring the surface of each piece. We meditate on the profoundness of such phenomenon or on the phenomenon of profoundness —which is not the same: how it permeates in the play with the image. And this image —and I end on this— is what appears to be the paint itself in the painting, the color shapes in a space that possibly we can better understand recalling Leo Steinberg’s analysis in the late seventies on reformulation of the pictorial plane, as a flat surface[12] defined by, among other issues, the essential slipping of the canvas from a vertical position on the easel to a new orientation on the table or on the ground, horizontally. This entails a conversion from a flat surface receiving objects (things), information (data) or, as we witness in Dalmau’s artwork, of mere paint as paint, into an abstract and indomitably sensation-stirring and emotion-sparking material substratum. Let us not search beyond phenomena, if anything, only to better grasp them.
— [1] Laura J. Snyder, “El ojo del observador. Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek y la reinvención de la mirada”, Barcelona, Acantilado, 2017. [2] Maurice Blanchot, “El espacio literario”, Barcelona, Paidós, 1992, p. 26. [3] As we mentioned earlier, the shapes adopted by the paint in Dalmau’s works of art reveal themselves as shapeless. Regarding the definition of this term, Georges Bataille wrote: “A dictionary is born from the moment it does not only convey the meaning, but also the tasks and duties of words. Thus, shapeless is not only an adjective with that meaning, but rather a term used to reduce things, demanding that everything have a shape. It designates something lacking any rights in any way and crushed all over like a spider or a worm. In fact, to keep academicians content, the universe should have some sort of shape. Philosophy has no other aim but to endow with a frock coat something that is, in fact, a mathematical frock coat. By contrast, to state that the universe does not resemble anything and is nothing but shapeless is like saying that the universe is like some sort of spider o spit.” Georges Bataille, “Shapeless” voice, in “Chronique: Dictionnaire”, Documents (no. 7, December 1929). Paris: Mercure de France, 1968, p. 382.
[4] Francisco Calvo Serraller, “Extravíos: Enjambre”, Babelia, El País, 4 November 2017. [5] Charles Baudelaire, “Salón of 1846”, in “Salones y otros escritos sobre arte”, Madrid, Visor, p. 109. [6] “Inevitably, in front of our eyes, the animal exists in the world as water in the water”. Georges Bataille, Teoría de la religion, Madrid: Taurus, 1998, p. 27. [7] Eva Figes, “La luz y Monet en Giverny”, Madrid, Antonio Machado Libros, 2014, p. 15. [8] Eva Figes, op. cit., p. 30. [9] Quoting the original text in French: «ces heures inertes de l’après-midi où la rivière est blanche et bleue des nuages et du ciel, et verte des arbres et des gazons, et rose des rayons déjà couchants sur les troncs des arbres, et dans la ténèbre éclairée de rouge des taillis de jardins où poussent les grands dahlias.» Marcel Proust, “Le peintre. Ombres — Monet”, in Contre Sainte-Beuve suivi de Nouveaux mélanges. Paris: Gallimard, 1971, p. 676. [10] Eva Figes, op. cit., p. 30. [11] Declarations by Frank Stella in 1964, quoted by David Batchelor, Cromofobia. Madrid: Síntesis, 2001, p. 119. [12] Leo Steinberg, “The Flatbed Picture Plane”, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. New York, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 61-98. |