4.5.08

BODIES MADE OF PAINT

By Cristina Montoya

The house is silent. The echo of the brushstroke resounds nearby. Energetic paint motion, the rubbed canvas… The knee pinned down the floor. The paste on the palette. A few steps back to gaze the creation. Silence. Back to the begining. I am anxious about his work and I start climbing the stairs towards the loft. The walls are filled with our imaginary story. Portraits, selfportraits, nudes, abstacts, natures… Near last flight begins to appear his figure: graceful, fine; flexible and smart. Covered in colour. With such strength that I do not guess correctly to describe. Photographs in the panel, drawings everywhere, brushes and paintbrushes, rags, tins, palette knives, piles of oil tubes, the great circular crystal-palette, the box filled with his fetishes. I worship this place. In it, you feel like being teletransported to an alchemist’s laboratory, a wizard’s cave. Where anything is possible. All you need is to expel the exorcism. Devoted in his doing, concentrated, he feels my presence and greets me with a warm smile that invites me to contemplate the canvas: “look at this darling, tell me what do you think”

Destiny joined me with Eduardo Alvarado 16 years ago. And we have been sharing our lifes for 15. I experienced his first contacts with art and I’ve been witnessing his trajectory during all this time. Years during which he has devoted his full body and soul to the study and development of Painting . If I learned so much, is everything I owe him for revealing me the magic universe of arts. Without it nowadays I wouldn’t be able of conceiving my own existence. In this sense Eduardo, due to his will and generosity without limits, does a great job by transmitting passionately the whole potential of human spirit. And all its forms of expression. He sows unceasing and vigorously all around him the disquiet for this vital prism and its authenticity. Art as necessity, as existencial experience. Trying to understand and construct himself. And the art work.

His smart glance, behind initial perception, searches for the invisible. It anticipates… recognizes, interprets and utilises known information; it is a continuous dialog with anything sensed, experienced, desired, material or accidental , that allow us to dive in his most intimate world. A gaze guided by his desire of knowledge, to understand and bind new with already known; taking it into his own account. Inquiring reality with successive and shrewds questions, whose answers will be discovered in the canvas. This humility with which he confronts his job results in a painting that unavoidably always breathes (plenty of) life and honesty, truth in its highest sense.

His interest for one of the most profound enigmas in human history, the (human) body, the most perfect machine that is, at the same time, filled with infinite imperfections, has always constituted the central subject. Specially his own and the woman.

With “Virgin and Venus” he illustrates his ideas about this last one: Goddess Mother, origin, creator, giver of life and love, pure, symbol of femininity . Object of desire, passion, beauty, animality and primitivism. Woman as mistery. Enigmas and melancholies. Eternal woman and as said by Moreau said: “capricious bird, usually fatal, that traverses life holding a flower on her hand while searching for a vague ideal, almost always terrible. Always forward, stepping over anything, including genious and saint men” Nudity and body as temple and obsession.

Full of african and natural reminiscenses, under expressionist parameters, bright ochres, greens, oranges, blacks… with virtuous and exceptional ability, out of the ordinary, it results in powerful images. Covered with animality, with a mysterious halo. Intimist and consequence of his unique sensibility.

Emotions and bodies made of PAINT, PAINT.

2004 grafito y acuarela/papel 21,1 x 29,9 cm