ABOUT THIS BOOK
Before saying a few words on an artistic work which permits various readings, to start, I have to admit I did not know very deeply the work of Daniel Borda. I had seen some of his pictures, a few expositions maybe, and we barely had met a few times and had a few words together. Nevertheless, as I have been going in depth of a very singular work, the different perspectives, the edges of a view, do not stop to surprise me.
I really think it is astonishing to find a work, in Colombia for in the rest of the world it is not the same, that insists on cultivating the classical tools of plastics as are the drawing, the colorfulness, the persistent look to the past, and in a word, the nourishment of the ancestral language of painting which may have been born in the caverns of Altamira or Lascaux, and that by force will spread while the world is world and while art is art.
By misfortune, it is always more frequent to find “artists” and particularly “conceptual artists” that solve their work either with an amazing easiness, or on the contrary, with a hallucinating impertinence. Not denigrating, of course, the conceptualism that during the XX century produced outstanding examples like Marcel Duchamp, for naming a single example, I think now a days it increasingly happens with some artistic works as in the marvelous tale of Hans Christian Andersen, when a young child astonished discovered, during the parade, that the new suit of the emperor did not exist simply because the monarch was nude.
Fortunately, you will not have to confront a “plotter”, as this abstruse language of the tendency of banners is called, because this work gathers a series of pieces of pure paintings, without any forced shavings and without forced tricks or any researched concepts that leads the artist to an ambiguity , that among us, minimizes the risk of creating, or said in another way, leads the author to hide behind a protection parapet which is not less than not knowing the implied profession, or even worse, a creative mediocrity.
This does not mean that behind the painting that constitutes the show today there is no solid concept or, better, a clear intention. In reality, the purpose, or the artists design, in the case of Daniel and other figurative and even abstracts who cultivate painting as it is, not only exists as part of a need to express himself. Again, from Altamira, the purpose to communicate, to express an idea, that by force has to be based on a concept, or better, in an idea without hidings or confusions, that allows the creator to be understood by anyone who stands in front of his work.
The important fact, ladies and gentlemen, is that here there is painting, and most of all, painting that allows us to deepen in the intention, and further on, allows us to discover the architecture of form that nourishes from drawing and helps to establish the relation with the details of a purpose and an undeniable attachment to tradition, which, in what seems a paradox, far away from being it, turns Daniel into a permanent explorer of the form of chromatist, and I am sure , to the urge of expressing from the intimate which leads him through deep shortcuts, among them those he takes in some of his works with the only purpose of transmitting a bunch of sensations and emotions.
Maybe one of the most remarkable aspects of the selection of works presented in this book, is the diversity, plurality I would say, of approach, of point of view that lead us to observe and analyze, to cite just a couple of names, in a sense were educated from their own experimentation.
In this book, which might be interpreted as the first approximation to a retrospective by the number of works and moments that it contains, the reader has the sensation of being not before one but before several authors whose angles of vision, always product of a search without barrack, they have helped to establish the only personality and an enrichment. It in the area of the aesthetics where one never stops learning and holding itself, it is equivalent to an ascending spiral so much regarding an indelible technical and formal profit, since to the exposition of a few contents that are transmuted in turn into messages with a view to the spectator.
But if one has the feeling that in this work there are many authors, here there are no less influences and eager traces, sometimes exuberant, shy as a search that Daniel has allowed himself as a rule of artistic life longing, I am sure, a personal realization. Therefore, if one single word would have to define Daniel Borda’s way through the most intricate and also enriching shortcuts of painting, it, by force, must be “search”. For not going further, many of the aspects of the different stages revealed in this variety of works suggest at once a learning from the conscious research of the works of the great masters of the universal painting, and of course, of also meticulous reading about some of the exponents of the XX century picture panorama. If Daniel in his curriculum vitae confesses himself to be self taught – which has the same value as being graduated from any alma mater, and even more if one thinks that, for instance, Velasquez or Durero, for naming only two names, somehow educated from their own experiments.
His work, from the early work in which a flavor hyperrealism loomed, was, like the great masters, the result of a thorough intellectual preparation that has left no doubt look, experimentation and revision.
I cannot avoid, when I look at Daniel’s previous expositions catalogs, some paintings are here in this book, or when I observe pictures of works he has made long time ago, or when in front of his most recent canvases, or the selection that rests in his studio, do not to think in a series of thematic as well as documental axes that put in evidence the different moments that envisage in his work. Maybe the first idea that comes to my head is the mastery in drawing, which being obvious is not less important. I still cannot understand a good painter that has not in him a good drawer.
Then come names of schools, traces of times or stages such as surrealism, for instance, or concepts referring to technical aspects, as well as the experience managing the light of the Dutch school that at once leads me to feel that in this work I can also perceive, maybe due to the theme but also for the efficiency of the technique, the smile of the conscious venalist painters of the Netherlands of the XVIII century.
And then come, like in a carousel, in the gratifying digression that comes with art, names, and of course traces such as Rene Magritte or, also, as we touch the topic of surrealism, a sense of dalinian atmosphere, manifested in the quality of the brush stroke, in a light some moments with a Mediterranean or maybe tropical transparency, but mostly in the impertinence of the space handling that nevertheless is wrapped in a more self confident and less unjustified imagination than the one of the Cadaques master.
These are notes suggested with carelessness for the work that seems to me respectable to be shown when I observe each work of the show, in view that maybe they have been maintained during the times, the different moments and different picture intensities.
I am especially interested in that surrealistic trace in the work of Daniel. I believe that surrealism is maybe the only tendency that covers, at the end, most of the XX century picture tendency and is related with bright moments such as pop art or optic art and why not even the expressionist abstraction. If dreams, dreamlike, imagination and the unconscious have been changing into a kind of creative leitmotif, or dominant motive of our time, the painting nourished from them gets in modernism an extraordinary relevance.
Let’s look at Daniel’s fruits, sunken in landscapes that are not theirs, that are even contradictory to their nature, even if at first sight they seem in a delicious coherence.
Is there not a sense of reality distortion which is deeply surrealistic? The painted image is not anymore a common reproduction for it expresses the painters thought and his fantasy and nourishing of an excess that does in no way deform it for it reinforces it, it turns into a substitute of reality that conscious or unconsciously stands in the spectators capacity to board the entelechy to release all kind of reflections, or maybe better, insinuations and references to moments and experiences.
The mechanism has of course a poetic content not only for what it allows to discover at first sight but for it incarnates an ensemble with enough delicacy to suggest. As in Magritte’s work, there comes a game: The eternal slyness of the surrealistic painters that cling to a, let’s say, valid trick, better to a plot, to accomplish the objective of transmitting an intention that gives validity to the language of art when joined to a purpose.
At this point I would like to emphasize another aspect of Daniel’s work that for me is very interesting, particularly when related to the conceptual moment of his work in the present sense. And it is the use of a paradoxical symbols, and therefore also with a surrealist and also moving implicit value.
I mean the moment in his work when he, with the brush, brings up a position in front of the war that takes place in the country and long ago is no longer a simple conflict. In that moment, the fruits, the landscape and the everyday objects while moving or serving as a back curtain to surroundings they don’t belong to, turn to allegories infinitely violent or a hidden pain again stressed by the excess, by the kind of gigantism that tries to emphasize the Reading of the artist, almost irony, that being in the background is present in every composition, in each scene.
Not wanting to be too long, I still have to mention the landscapes that Daniel recreates as part of a whole or as subjects themselves in the work.
I would ask myself, is there any element more surrealistic than a landscape? Just referring to Dali’s watches that go over like Camembert chesses in the middle of an isolated desert, or to those meticulous worlds almost precious created by Magritte as scenarios of his works, to see that in a good proportion the panorama shows the intention. In the case of Daniel, the landscape is at the same time scenario and subject, depending on the work and the time it was created.
In the first case, the treatment is close to classicism that, as I said before, instantly reminds of the approach to the Dutch school to a surrounding almost always included, dreamed of maybe by the unreal that is related to the geographic location of the artist, that establishes a perfect atmosphere for the scene developed in front of him. I would mention as an example the polyptic “Rainbow Cartridge Belt” where that landscape, to be broken up and abused , all Colombia, is not more than a mere message the artist wants to transmit.
The other possibility is the surrounding as a subject, and it is there where Daniel builds a universe maybe of his own and at the same time with more insinuations: Clouds of storm on the world, non existing trees, a chromatic exploration sui generis, different from the other appellant hat is common to Daniel, they end as owners of spaces that fight between illusion and condemnation. The illusion of the bucolic that could even be provocative and the condemnation of the tortuous, of the dreamlike, of a cosmic chaos invented by him, maybe dreamed of, or an intuition in the middle of a nightmare that is connected with reality.
The work of Daniel is to be looked at carefully, to be analyzed, and in some cases, as in this last approach to the landscape, to be digested and be read further than the apparent. Anyway, it is the work of a man that, taking back what I said at the beginning, has searched for an own language and has found it; of an artist who in that search has not been tempted by an easy conceptualism, and with fair good receipt of criticism and media, fulfilling the first condition of an artist: Being himself, without following fashion that, as a Colombian poet and translator said, Ismael Enrique Arciniegas, is always in the next to last fashion.
I now I welcome this publication that allows us to follow the interesting and coherent development of a career and to be delighted with a profession that as is easily seen, comes from obstinacy, sharpness and mostly painting.
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