“ROAD OF THE
UNCONSCIOUS”
"Lo Ritual y lo Mundano" (The Ritual and the wordly)
is the title of the exhibition that peruvian painter, Rafael
Diaz, presents on the occasion of the Hispanic month, in the
main hall of the Latín American Art Museum; located
on 22 St. of the recognized "calle
ocho" in Miami - Florida.
Talking with property, before starting this pictoric analysis,
I must mention that this collection is linked by certain
mystic and sub-urban elements. Rafael's paintings present
heterogeneous to us, though they renounce to all dogmatic
or academic aspiration.
His thematic makes him knowledgeable of presences with
different and multiple thoughts. This knowledge brings him
to face reality. An alternative wisdom that turns sacred
the popular-traditional and the mundane into religious.
This natural perception, makes him the owner of an original
sensibility that feeds the existence of a timeless plastic
criteria with unique personality.
The pictorial aesthetic of Rafael Diaz, remains in our
eyes retina and becomes permanent. His colorful resonance
target the public from a wild and tropical context, poetic
as well as inexorable.
Painting that hipnotizes and experiments into the visual,
where the "logical reality" is modified, offering
cinematographic and technicolor perspectives of the magnificent
and mythical Amazon.
This young painter of 32; besides showing us his personal
universe, makes us enter certain social realities in which
marginal individuals living in ghettos and colorful characters
in bars; assume and propose a painful importance, dramatic,
scrawny; but
at the same time sensual, lucid and shining: "El cuerpo"
(The body), "Acaríciame" (Caress me), "Copa
rota" (Broken glass), are works that shake our conscience.
The reflections shaped on these canvas, dare to question
certain psychoanalitic principals and doubt any superficial
conclusion, and deepens the necessary relation of human
beings with the earth and it's conscience.
The painter makes us shudder with phrases from writers
and songs that contain a code or a message, sometimes direct,
sometimes indirect.
In this way, along with his hability with the brush and
color he links valuable feelings that share the original
and dreaming vision of his works. Rafael Diaz, makes intuition
his capacity to establish his style with lines and colors,
his aesthetic being diluting frontiers and establishes a
contemporarity based on tradition, ritual and religión:
"Piel de tierra y sangre" (Skin of soil and blood),
"Yawar fiesta" (Blood feast), "Los animales
que uno ha sido..." (The animals one has been), "La
virgen y la madre del Ayahuasca" (Virgin and mother
of Ayahuasca) among other, make this plastic images assume
as the principal meaning, the solitary and individualistic
appearance of the artist; like a springboard of personal
dreams, full of magic, mistery, daring and seduction.
The ideas that come from his hands, feed on the pagan and
tradicional mysticism of the amazonian native tribes as
well as a particular vision of reality. Developing alternative
or "crazy" projects, with knowledge that emerge
from his capacity to penetrate in the profound of the misterious
as well as in the marginal of the urban. At the same time
beautiful and bizarre.
The millenial wisdom of the Amazon, finds in Rafael a seed
that already starts to germinate and that, for sure, will
offer us a window to the particular and phantastic ways
of life where the equilibrium of men with nature is an essential
part of the existence.
The plastic pre-prominence of Rafael Diaz consolidates
with a creative painting that analizes and modifies personal
languages and that opens to other cultures. Antropology,
Chamanism, Psicoanálisis, Catharsis, Religión
y Life. This structures are the essence of his work, supported
by urges of assured success in details. Ilussion, desire,
discussion, dreams; without attributes or characteristics.
Rafael´s soul undresses in front of us with a nervous
but calmed and controlled skin. You can perceive all the
love for his homeland, his frivolous, erotic and sacred
worries.
The underground throbbing under the skin, the man that
hides, that disguises, that we do not take advantage of
appears in the road of the unconcious, surrealistic route
of a personal world ready to share his most spectacular
and moving visions. Assuming his ambiguity, intuitions and
sensations is necessary to perceive that world which is
personal and becomes collective throuh art.
Painting is not only to picture this or that, it is keep
away all semantic possibility and separate the signs as
in a ludic game. Shredding the imagination in instants of
reality and irreality. For Rafael Diaz, the human being
is no more that the light that struggles with its existance
in the world. This way of fluctuating existance is his true
creative reason.
Joseph Conrado
Profesor of Art History
Miami -Florida Octubre 2003
