DANIEL BORDA´S PAINTING
Daniel Borda´s painting gathers topics and motivations produced by a vital project he took over since his childhood. It was in this stage when he discovered his innate capacity in drawing when he skillfully painted everything he saw. If we could describe his work in a few lines we would have to say that it comes from both, authenticity in a commitment throughout the years, and a personal esthetic concept. That is why he would not follow schools or actual tendencies, which at the long last would paralyze his creative labor, but, on the contrary follow his own taste and inclinations.
He considers himself autodidact, although he took some formal academic lessons with masters like Manzur and other ones of the same nature. But his fundamental attitude has been persistence. In his small study in La Soledad suburb, he paints from sun rise until late at night. He says this is the only way to achieve a serious work, going beyond marketing and publicity, which are difficult to overcome in today’s consuming society.
He recognizes the influence of the classic painters, which are necessary to understand an artistic formation, as well as that of the contemporaries and surrealist painters, being Magritte the main one among them. From the classics he inherited his devotion for painting, the perfection of the lines and the geometry of the forms. Borda says that if he would not have been a painter he would have been an architect, like the Renascence masters who combined these two professions.
From the contemporary painters he has taken the illusory but also the ludic tendencies. This is the reason for his preference for objects like for instance the chess play board, as a foundation of various characters that interact in the series called “The play garden”. It is mainly here, where the painter’s vitality and joy with color and forms are revealed. We can imagine the painter using the finest brush to paint the nerves of the fruit, its roundness, the veining of the tree tomato fruit.
Such is his obsession for the detail, in a true outpouring of hyper-realism. For Borda it is necessary to rescue nature in daily living, nature can go with any action. For instance, the cellist playing his instrument in front of a papaya.
His painting is essentially visual but at the same time a painting where the senses delight in those fruits placed on the foreground, painted in a greater dimension than the rest of the elements of the composition. The painter places them before our eyes with a provocative intention. Touch, taste and smell wake at the sight of figures that cause admiration and lead us to the thought that the painter, as any creator, inaugurates the world again and makes us obvious in its absolute presence.
Those red and brilliant peppers; the violet cherries that surround the tale character in a placid wood; the soft form of the bananas on which one can rest or climb to reach the endings; the rider jumping over the watermelon; the child on the swing among a landscape of passion fruit and sapota.
Daniel Borda plays with these worlds, he prints grace and humor on them, he makes them his as he transforms them changing their dimension. He also paints the plants with the detail of a botanist, but also with the fantasy of the dreamer in an approach to that “Garden of delight” created by the Bosco where man and nature live together, for which he felt great admiration as he observed it for several days at the Prado Museum. From this triptych he took the most vital, leaving the morbid, dramatic and unvarnished erotic that were present in this painting. I think that if it would not have been for these remarkable influences, having that refined love for nature, Borda could have fallen in a simple tropicalism.
But also, next to this living natures, to the play garden and to the other objective elements, he gets into the dream territory in order to elaborate a dreamlike painting of the inner being. He was inspired in that psychoanalytic test (The Rorschach test) where each individual saw elements of his own personality through strange colorful figures.
In his case they are fantastic images possibly representing cities submerged in the seas of the times, trees of different colors that lie beneath the earth’s crust, chromatic patches that may represent unknown objects, dreamed about skies and clouds, and so on.
Daniel Borda´s imaginative and poetic capacity expands in these works, as well as in the one called Atlantes. There he perceives a series of characters emerged from the Atlántida myth to place them this time in lunatic territories, in extra-terrestrial spaces, surrounded by satellites and planetary figures.
His series “Metal on skin”, is part of a social proposal pretending to symbolize the violence that exists in our country with those gas cylinders which are used as war weapons. They hang in line from strings to remind us those dramatic incidents. At the same time we see bullets in line and next to them the mortars placed in a threatening attitude. As a kind of irony or maybe with the intention to diminish this tragic representation, there are lipsticks enclosed, also simulating bullets with these military objects.
Daniel Borda is a magnificent portrait painter; we miss a more detailed work in this direction, for, for an expert draftsman like him, it would consolidate even more his present well-earned prestige.
This reputation has been earned despite his disdain for the last trend setting tendencies and specially the conceptual coming from the very new generations. Because Daniel still believes in beauty, in drawing, in the everlasting forms of art that in spite of all this, are coming back from the ashes of post modernity.
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