"Parlem / Let's Talk" Painting

One of the most famous speeches in history was pronounced by a man who claimed he had a dream, and the largest crowd that is remembered (gathered for the occasion in a monumental open space) upon hearing those words, immediately this dream became theirs. As beings blessed with reason, if there is something we all have in common, it is precisely our capacity to dream those kind of dreams, and to share them with our fellow human beings. This is how we become partakers of a community, of a shared reasoning, gathered around a fire, whose flames stoke a universe of meanings, of narratives and common beliefs that unite us, not just to those that are present, but also to those who had preceded us , and to those who will follow us. In this way, we go through time looking for our place in the world, any place that allows us to awake from reality, from being mere specks of dust floating, just for a moment, between oceans of time, lost in the abysses of outer space. That of what we call space, which in essence is an immense absence of things, an absence of air, an absence of life. So hard is the life in the space that astronauts have to protect themselves from it with sophisticated suits not to perish at the precise moment of coming into contact with it. Therefore, humans insist on living with our feet on the ground, and yet, in the troposphere, the thin skin that covers the Earth, and that constitutes the habitable zone of the planet, we find ourselves on a surface that is possible to travel, but where it is difficult to find a place to live, where to shelter. Because humans live in dwellings, in temples of concretion, not in the mathematical abstract space, since space is precisely what remains when the demolition of a dwelling occurs, when the place in which we inhabit disappears. In the place of the others we are always out of place, because our place is in the place of our childhood, in the house in which we grew up, in the square where we played. And those places are fiercely piled-up by untied time, and our childhood home is permanently demolished. It is in that moment of loss when we discover that there are (or have been) sacred places, places that did not exist before being sacred, since in principle, as we said, everything is in the space, and places do not exist, at most there are locations, Cartesian coordinates, qualitatively identical to each other, since all points in space are identical to each other, indistinguishable Certainly, it is strange not to inhabit the earth anymore, not to continue those customs barely learned; (...) Strange is not to continue wishing the desires. Strange is to see, lost, scattered in space, all that that was united. It is painful to be dead and, laborious to recover bit by bit a minimum of eternity. In this frozen universe of mathematical indifference, the place is born from a qualitative relationship with space. The space is sacralized to become a dwelling place, a place of worship, a meeting place, a place of exchange. Thanks to that qualitative relationship with the space that as humans we establish, and by virtue of which the places are born, we conquer places where to wander, where to hunt, places to inhabit. That conquest occurs with the symbolic occupation of space. Although the first painting, Paleolithic painting, is associated in our imagery to caves like Altamira, the work of archeologists in recent decades is giving us a different image, with an abundance of outdoors paintings and prints, found in rock shelters ( that is to say, cavities sheltered from the rain, but outdoors) even directly on rocks outdoors. Apart from the specific interpretation of each of these plastic expressions, what seems certain is that there is a symbolic occupation of the territory, in a context in which each human group relied on very large areas of the same territory to meet their needs through hunting, fishing and gathering. The image marks the territory. That place of belonging is necessarily established by drawing a circle, which inevitably establishes an inside and an outside. The place is defined by contrast with the space that remains outside, what is not ours is what gives a seal of approval to what is ours. Villarriba (upper town) enables and delimits Villabajo (lower town). Now, a circle cannot be closed without a vertical, without a compass that orbits above what is ours, without some common beliefs that do not attend to reasons. That entity strange to the place, but that establishes the place, is what modern humans know as art. But to inhabit our natural place, to which we are natural, is like living inside an egg, protected and fed, but limited by the shell. In the places we inhabit, so peculiar to us and so sacred, so habitable, so comfortable, so closed in on themselves, that the air does not blow. It is necessary to open doors and windows and letting the empty space to get in, what is not ours, if we want to have fresh air to breathe, that goes beyond the aroma of our meals, beyond the fragrance of our ceremonies, beyond the smell of our perspiration. An egg, when seen from the outside is fragile and insignificant ( “do not care for an egg”, spanish expression for “not giving a shit”) seen from within it is deceiving, since, being an homogenous and unitary shell, white and soft, it hides its limits, it is falsely unlimited because, simply, it does not show us any edge or corner. To even understand that it is an egg, it is necessary to break it, open a laborious crack in the shell and get out with a lot of effort to the outer, to discover, when seeing the egg for the first time from outside, that has been irremediably destroyed by the crack that has been opened. It has lost its purity, its authenticity, its absolute validity. We are living in the precarious crack that has been opened in between place and space, between what is ours and that of nobody, and although the empty space, impersonal, arid and abstract like the immensities of the desert, like an immeasurable ocean, becomes uninhabitable, our inevitable place, the one of our beliefs, rites and habits, the one that constitutes us in our peculiarity and shelters us from the gale, is a place full of tradition, suffocating of misunderstandings, like a full boat drifting in the open sea, like a lost caravan in the desert. Art will always be out of place. Although it defines what is ours, it is part of that of the other. Altamira´s paintings are out of place. The caves themselves are stalactites, stalagmites, underground rivers, and at most, cave animals.The history of painting, of human culture, is born out of a displacement, of placing things as out of place as some bisons could be, used to graze and herding2 on bright meadows, inside the dark caverns that go into the inside of the earth. Realize that when placing a bison out of place, the space of the cave becomes a place, what is natural becomes human, and then it seems to us that the bisons could not have been anywhere else, an impression corroborated by experience, since we do not see bisons scampering through the countryside, in the surroundings, and its extinction comes to underline how human the bison of Altamira are. Natalia Ginzburg sees it clearly: "The pains of the fools will be their torment, because they do not know the road that goes to the city.”3.The road to the cosmopolitan, to the political, to the public, is the road to the city. Life in the town, in the tribe, in the family, in what is ours, is a life without windows, without views to what is not ours. But once we left the town, the birthplace, we are once again traveling through space "do we really know who we are, where we come from, where are we going? Or have we lost the North? Because who has an origin, who has a native place, not only has a provenance and a home always ready to be hosted, but also a safe and welcoming point to return (the sacred ground as the ultimate right of men to have where to fall dead) ».4. It is not precisely a happy ending to have where to fall dead. But it is to the most that we can aspire. Especially any poet who, like Rilke, writes from and outside space, from a non place halfway between form and matter, between idea and thing, between the sensitive and the cognitive thinking, from beyond life, but from quite away from death. That living without living in me, that as if I were already dead, are the left overs that you have left when you give your life to painting. It is the price for trying, arduously, to gradually recover a minimum of eternity: giving your life to a fanatical practice, like that of the Vestals (the priestesses who kept burning the sacred fire of the temple of Vesta in Rome) which does not promise, of course, any happy ending, no reward beyond the satisfaction of keeping alive the flame that one day joined us, although perhaps it is that of a wick about to reach its end. The flame of the Vestals was extinguished, and the world continued turning. Today the universe of meanings in which we move, and with which we name the world, does not even remotely depend on painting to reproduce itself. And yet, here are my paintings.

Painting:Oil on Wood

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:22.4 W x 15.7 H x 0.8 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.