Odir The Artist

"Give me any tool and I will create art; give me color and I will paint a Palestine that will never be conquered."
Odir. Pause to pronounce his name. It has been echoed by accents from the depths of the world's diversity, by people who have met Odir during his conquest as an Artist. A walk not through glass galleries and magazine archives, weaseled between popular gossip houses and technical institutions, among professing critics and vainglorious peers, but a march before the faces of humanity, before poverty and gluttony, rolled within backpacks of anonymous addictions living under a steel bridge of Portland Oregon, framed within the homes of those who remain that believe in the language of the spirit.
From the scripts of inner temple walls of Tazumal, protected by Chalchuapa jungles of Pipil Nation, Odir raised himself, with Maya faith, three thousand years alive, in the continuance of the profession of the scribe. Not the recorder of time, but the creator of time, to profess an eternity that the spirit of people alive today, among the forces of violent temporality and within the hollowness of material certainty, must compel their intellect to believe.
It is a continuance of the responsibility immemorial of the Artist, to...

Excerpt from conversation with progressive art critic:

"Yes, there is the well documented and well exhausted art school standard of performing visual thematic body's of work, though it is hard for me to believe visual themes translate to a progress or even movement in ideas. This idea, in fact, is the exact theme and gesture represented by Odir's work. He has said to me so numerous of times, he very consciously is refuting, or opposing, the boundary of technique in forming the critical conversation he intends by creating each piece that he does. I am not alone in viewing contemporary art as an endless black whole of technique, or 'newness' of theme, rather than the real movement of content. I liken this thematic era to the era of visual bumper stickers, of course when artists have to compete with the age of advertisement, it is easy to put this development into context.

I quite understand that providing the, awfully trite, visual theme is the "cue" to simulate cohesion, and yet the cohesion of any time period of work by Odir, say his Portland OR "Milepost 5" period offers exceeding depth in intellectual themes, that of MP5 being "contemporary despair of modern culture as reflected in the artists".

Odir is absolutely...