HUNT #19 Painting

www.danielromano.com.ar For HUNT project. Surfaces games Federico Baeza, Art curator. Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies, 1922. Figures dimly emerge from mist, a barely colored whiteness, so thick that it only allows us to recognize the presence of subtly outlined bodies on a background without horizons or apparent landforms. Insinuated silhouettes, elusive lines and tones. Surrounded by this dense atmosphere, we are examined by the frontal and symmetric presence of deer heads that overlap with these vaguely outlined human anatomies. The grimace on these heads shows an impending threat; something is stalking them. As in TV documentaries about wild life in dense woods, arid steppes or green plains, the face of the deer seems to be frozen in the exact moment it detects the hunter. Its head turns violently, upright ears point at danger, its minute, dark and blank eyes sense us. On the surface of the painting, in this evening clarity suspended in time, the eyes of the deer are cracks, notches of unsaturated colors. In the room you are going through, figures appear to be looking for each other; they observe and suspect each other; they are on guard. Alone, or in pairs, they look at each other. You may think that the face of the deer is a mask, and that the hunter´s imagination has imprinted that deer's mask as a code for what he considers his prey. At the end of the 1950s, Erving Goffman recalls that the original meaning of the word person is mask. The father of microsociology found this etymological origin very useful: in the little scenes of our relationships, in our wishes, in our hunting targets, we create roles, masquerades, surfaces games that we use to decode the enigma that the other represents and, at the same time, to create an image of ourselves. In the clarity of the pictorial surface you are observing, the outline of the hunter does not appear. Maybe his territory is not permanent; this predator can be a floating place, some sort of mist that impregnates all the space in the room. A blurred hunter within the environment. These bodies can be predators and prey at the same time when they look at each other alternately. This is a game of reflections and transparencies, a land of attempts, between actions and predictions, steps forward and setbacks. In the series Hunt, Daniel Romano wonders once again about a situation that has been keeping him awake for some time: the perimeter of our interpersonal relationships, the invisible threads that coordinate calculations and tactics within the winding limit of our closest bonds. Within these personal politics, there are surfaces games, mirrors where we, and the others, create a profile. Masks, skins, cuticles, arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling. In the image, in the painting, wishing appears. It is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts. Federico Baeza (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1978) He is researcher, critic and teacher specializing in contemporary art. He graduated in arts and history and art theory at the Faculty of philosophy and letters by the University of Buenos Aires. He received doctoral scholarships awarded by the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET. It has developed research in the Centre for studies and documentation of the MACBA (Barcelona) around the heritage of the institution on Argentinian conceptual artists. More recently, he works in the field of arts management developing curatorships as the project of a retrospective of Argentine artists of the last ten years to cycles of talks scheduled from the area of University extension of IUNA and OSDE Foundation. It is currently director of extension and institutional linkage, Adjunct Professor of undergraduate and graduate in the area of criticism of Arts IUNA. He is co-author of three books on Visual and performing arts, publishes articles on contemporary art in journals, write catalogues of artists and regularly participates in conferences and other national and international meetings for a decade. It develops research and scripts for Encuentro channel about contemporary art.

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:43.3 W x 43.3 H x 0 D in

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