Follow us:
"Tyrannosaurus", José Díaz
October 20th - November 18th 2011
Selina Blasco
José Díaz has titled his first solo show TYRANOSSAURUS. From the little I could find out about this animal, I was interested by the size – it seems to be the biggest of all dinosaurs. I felt this interest because, as I write about his pictures, the ineffable is around me. I look up at the Maria Moliner’s Spanish dictionary, less schematic than the Royal Academy’s, and learn that besides what I thought (that the ineffable was the unspeakable), it also turns out to be about what is “so big or of such a nature that words cannot express it”. I’m not sure if Jose knows it, maybe he does: I tend to think that the choice of the show title is a manifestation of intuition, one of the most appreciable traces of his personality as a painter, beside his intelligence, strength and sense of humor – of which I will soon talk, if space allows.
The response to this that cannot be expressed with words would be silence. But as I am afraid that leaving the sheet blank may be understood as a way to wriggle out, I try to let the feeling of resistance in, without losing sight of the ineffable. In the pictures of the show, I see a world that is recognizable, but resistant to be described. It could be ruins, but it isn’t, because there is nothing in it that could previously be had been done or ready. In some parts there seem to be traces of water, of a landscape that had been submerged. Or entelechies – Maria Moliner defines them as perfect beings or perfect situations “that cannot exist in reality”.
They are pictures in which you can see what you want – ambiguous images, different depending on how you look at them, without reference planes. Their composition and structure invite to go off on tangents. The spaces I have seen as ponds may be skies or plateaus, may be in front or behind, inside or outside. Broken lines build sprocket-shaped ridges, teeth, or the presence of pre and post-technogical humanoids. José Díaz says he starts to paint one thing and ends up painting something else. Pareidolia and doodles: games from which he unleashes irony and humor.
The figures of horns and euros (besides many more recognizable ones) act as pictograms; calligraphies of unknown languages that are not subject to the logics of verbal but, in any way, receive their judgments. Subliminal messages that are received through the strength that José uses to free his hand, to let it go from what the eye thinks. The efficiency of this battle against the eye results in the difficulty imposed to our verbal register on what our own eyes see.
Pareidolia, double images, and pictograms join different paintings together, and also does color. Grayish-ocher tones can be seen as caves, but he told me he has found them in the subway – suburban caving. In the black pictures he paints the night; and once he called the starry sky a “permanent exhibition”.
Also the graphics of the strokes unite the pictures to each other. José Díaz has painted many of the paintings for this show at once. He used to do it before, but those who know his work will see that the new works have a certain economic exercise. What before had to be in just one painting, in crowded pictures (not coincidentally, with much more varied color ranges) is now dispersed. Something is dispensed from a picture to be painted on another. The ancients said that the good painter knows how to raise his hand away from the painting, knows how to finish it.
I have seen some of the pictures for this exhibition photographed as triptychs. We recognize the world in them also in association with Bosch, Bruegel primarily, or sometimes Dalí (or other surrealists). But before the association there is difference. For instance, there is nothing of the annoying graphics of Bosch in them. They may be Boschs or Bruegels, but painted. It is as if Jose had looked at this painters looking for masses separated by spaces that open between them. While we talked of Bosch and Bruegel in his studio, he showed me “Finding Wally”: this is the manifestation of pictorial intelligence that I referred to above.
The feeling of resistance that I mentioned is in his painting as a force. The horns and euros are force images. The titles of his pictures – caught from captchas – are ingenious hieroglyphics on political, technological or economic power. In some occasions we have talked about the force and the “catastrophe paintings” of Deleuze.
The calligraphy to which I referred is also, and above all, tremor – a seismographic record. The time of transformation from one image into another is also a force, and also what happens to avoid the hand being subject to the eye: fighting against the cliché, against one’s own intention. And the goal is not for it to disappear from the picture, but rather to be left as a rest – one of this disposals is, again, the euro sign – and ruled by the composition, that acts as another force. The picture is a ring.
Finally, another note on resistance: the “Notas sobre la órbita” (“Notes on the Orbit”) that José wrote as a contributor of “Orbitando o Ignoto” (“Orbiting the unknown”, the fictions of science research program in which he participates) finish with the word “dissidence”. Painting as a dissidence strategy.
José Díaz (Madrid, 1981) graduated in Visual Arts by Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2006. In 2007 - 2008 he lived in Berlin, with a scholarship to work as assistant at Invaliden 1 gallery. In 2009 he continues his academic studies enrolling in Master en Creación y Arte (M.A.) at Universidad Complutense and forms with other artists the workgroup “Orbitando lo ignoto” (“Orbiting the unknown”) within the sciences of fiction research program Prisma.
He lives and works in Madrid, developing his artwork through painting, which he understands as a research process and as a way of making, especially linked to the emotional processes that happen between men and their envairoment. He uses painting as a transportation of such processes to a factual environment that makes them visible, and in the transmission of this information both deformation and construction take place.
José complements his artistic activities with other projects, such as Autoplacer/Sindicalistas, focused in musical diffusion and self-publishing, and Machines Desirantes, in which he contributes to audio-visual productions.
www.jose-diaz.net
José Díaz has titled his first solo show TYRANOSSAURUS. From the little I could find out about this animal, I was interested by the size – it seems to be the biggest of all dinosaurs. I felt this interest because, as I write about his pictures, the ineffable is around me. I look up at the Maria Moliner’s Spanish dictionary, less schematic than the Royal Academy’s, and learn that besides what I thought (that the ineffable was the unspeakable), it also turns out to be about what is “so big or of such a nature that words cannot express it”. I’m not sure if Jose knows it, maybe he does: I tend to think that the choice of the show title is a manifestation of intuition, one of the most appreciable traces of his personality as a painter, beside his intelligence, strength and sense of humor – of which I will soon talk, if space allows.
The response to this that cannot be expressed with words would be silence. But as I am afraid that leaving the sheet blank may be understood as a way to wriggle out, I try to let the feeling of resistance in, without losing sight of the ineffable. In the pictures of the show, I see a world that is recognizable, but resistant to be described. It could be ruins, but it isn’t, because there is nothing in it that could previously be had been done or ready. In some parts there seem to be traces of water, of a landscape that had been submerged. Or entelechies – Maria Moliner defines them as perfect beings or perfect situations “that cannot exist in reality”.
They are pictures in which you can see what you want – ambiguous images, different depending on how you look at them, without reference planes. Their composition and structure invite to go off on tangents. The spaces I have seen as ponds may be skies or plateaus, may be in front or behind, inside or outside. Broken lines build sprocket-shaped ridges, teeth, or the presence of pre and post-technogical humanoids. José Díaz says he starts to paint one thing and ends up painting something else. Pareidolia and doodles: games from which he unleashes irony and humor.
The figures of horns and euros (besides many more recognizable ones) act as pictograms; calligraphies of unknown languages that are not subject to the logics of verbal but, in any way, receive their judgments. Subliminal messages that are received through the strength that José uses to free his hand, to let it go from what the eye thinks. The efficiency of this battle against the eye results in the difficulty imposed to our verbal register on what our own eyes see.
Pareidolia, double images, and pictograms join different paintings together, and also does color. Grayish-ocher tones can be seen as caves, but he told me he has found them in the subway – suburban caving. In the black pictures he paints the night; and once he called the starry sky a “permanent exhibition”.
Also the graphics of the strokes unite the pictures to each other. José Díaz has painted many of the paintings for this show at once. He used to do it before, but those who know his work will see that the new works have a certain economic exercise. What before had to be in just one painting, in crowded pictures (not coincidentally, with much more varied color ranges) is now dispersed. Something is dispensed from a picture to be painted on another. The ancients said that the good painter knows how to raise his hand away from the painting, knows how to finish it.
I have seen some of the pictures for this exhibition photographed as triptychs. We recognize the world in them also in association with Bosch, Bruegel primarily, or sometimes Dalí (or other surrealists). But before the association there is difference. For instance, there is nothing of the annoying graphics of Bosch in them. They may be Boschs or Bruegels, but painted. It is as if Jose had looked at this painters looking for masses separated by spaces that open between them. While we talked of Bosch and Bruegel in his studio, he showed me “Finding Wally”: this is the manifestation of pictorial intelligence that I referred to above.
The feeling of resistance that I mentioned is in his painting as a force. The horns and euros are force images. The titles of his pictures – caught from captchas – are ingenious hieroglyphics on political, technological or economic power. In some occasions we have talked about the force and the “catastrophe paintings” of Deleuze.
The calligraphy to which I referred is also, and above all, tremor – a seismographic record. The time of transformation from one image into another is also a force, and also what happens to avoid the hand being subject to the eye: fighting against the cliché, against one’s own intention. And the goal is not for it to disappear from the picture, but rather to be left as a rest – one of this disposals is, again, the euro sign – and ruled by the composition, that acts as another force. The picture is a ring.
Finally, another note on resistance: the “Notas sobre la órbita” (“Notes on the Orbit”) that José wrote as a contributor of “Orbitando o Ignoto” (“Orbiting the unknown”, the fictions of science research program in which he participates) finish with the word “dissidence”. Painting as a dissidence strategy.
José Díaz (Madrid, 1981) graduated in Visual Arts by Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2006. In 2007 - 2008 he lived in Berlin, with a scholarship to work as assistant at Invaliden 1 gallery. In 2009 he continues his academic studies enrolling in Master en Creación y Arte (M.A.) at Universidad Complutense and forms with other artists the workgroup “Orbitando lo ignoto” (“Orbiting the unknown”) within the sciences of fiction research program Prisma.
He lives and works in Madrid, developing his artwork through painting, which he understands as a research process and as a way of making, especially linked to the emotional processes that happen between men and their envairoment. He uses painting as a transportation of such processes to a factual environment that makes them visible, and in the transmission of this information both deformation and construction take place.
José complements his artistic activities with other projects, such as Autoplacer/Sindicalistas, focused in musical diffusion and self-publishing, and Machines Desirantes, in which he contributes to audio-visual productions.
www.jose-diaz.net
