Rafo Díaz "from banal reality to hallucinating reality..."

Rafo Díaz displays a particular use of color. Grading warm colors, exacerbated until they become fluorescent to connote the transformation of a banal reality into a hallucinating reality. In addition to the use of these colors, there is a perspective framework, a highly original sense of composition that incorporates a certain cinematic tradition and the comic.

In his writings, Rafo Díaz tells about the genesic formings of his work and true to the traditions of the Amazon peoples, he has participated in rituals where he learned the virtues of a powerful hallucinogen called the ayahuasca.

This has most likely conferred him a personal perspective and has made him sensitive to posing questions, to portraying problems in the every day life of those considered as living off the edge of society by those who hold the power, explicit erotic and sexual connotations in some of Diaz' paintings have caused great impact. However, it is through these graphic and evident elements that Diaz vindicates human love through its most popular and ideologized forms, portraying scenes of well-known boleros and Peruvian waltzes that are part of our Latin musical culture.

This topic of love may seem to many as a concession to a male-dominated society, however in my humble opinion, it is quite the contrary. Diaz achieves a reading of a universe of images that have their own code and autonomy.

Crude reality flows out of Rafo Diaz' brush, sometimes impressionist, sometimes with an ugly stroke, turned into a aesthetic object thanks to a cinema-like sense of composition, of framing and perspective, in addition to a festive color shading that penetrates our senses to provide us with a new dimension of reality.

ANASTASIO LOVO.
Managua - Nicaragua, March 2003
Poet, novelist and literature and art critic.

"HE WHO HAS NOT SINNED IS NOT HUMAN, HE WHO HAS NOT LIVED, HAS NOT LOVED"