Hidden Geometry of Thoughts 2
David Beltrán
from November 17, 2023 to January 13, 2024
Painting is, to a large extent, the opposite of archaeology. Where archaeology removes layers, painting adds them. That is why, in many ways, painting tends to lie, to avoid depth, to deny the subterranean confirmation that all excavation seeks. And all its truth is out there, in the evidence of the visible, in the epidermis of the canvas.
Many of the challenges of painting lie, then, in its surface, in its primary impact on our grid. In a violence exercised on the gaze, to which it tries to surrender without contemplation. Thus, painting also implies setting up the ideal set for this capitulation to take place; the stage for the archaeology, the interpretation or the texture that propitiate the text - this text, without going any further - to attain the reason for its existence.
To paint is to arrange the accumulation of layers necessary for us to deal with the truth of the skin. Perhaps to build the ideal territory for camouflage. When David Beltrán works on walls, or when he finds on them the ideal forms to find "spontaneous" paintings due to erosion or the churros of time, he is aware of this situation.
This is not all, however...
Because we are dealing here with a painter who immerses himself in the interior of painting, disavowing painting at first sight and seeking, at all risks, to reveal to us the invisible layers that are not visible to the eye. His is, then, a double project that introduces us to the truth at first sight and, at the same time, to the submerged truth. In the evidence and in what cannot be detected on the wall or in the crypt.
There is a point at which there is nothing more conceptual than colour, nothing more intellectual than that which can only be explained by the microscope.
This series of previous layers is to the painter what the anguish of influences is to the poet. A previous enormity with which he is obliged to contend and from which he can hardly emerge victorious.
Beltrán takes on, in part, the challenge of the epidermal. And, in part, the challenge of the unseen. In part, he attends to the superficial and, in part, to that which requires immersion. Hers is a quest between these two truths of painting.
That is why his photography, although it is not documentary, does set itself the objective of documenting this twofold unveiling: it focuses on revealing what is veiled.... And, for this very reason, this photography - not always evident, even not always "photography" understood in strict terms - is not dedicated to searching but to finding.
To find what? Well, spontaneous paintings, "pictures" made by the elements, stains that acquire meaning thanks to the passage of time and its inclemencies. It is there where we understand another -one more- of the truths that this work points out. That painting is assembled from our eyes.
That to look is to paint.
Truths on paint
Iván de la Nuez