The reason for our digital art

 

 

 

 

  

Throughout my life I have gone through different sensory experiences linked to some kind of contemplation of works created by human beings.

When I was seventeen, I saw Visconti's film "Death in Venice" on television, and at the time I was so struck by the beauty of its images and by Mahler's music that I could hardly get up from my armchair. I admit that today I find it almost unbearable, corny and very dated.

Something similar happened to me with Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander", which I also saw in my youth, and I remember my amazement at what seemed to me, and still seems to me today, a masterpiece.

There followed the sight of Paris, the first time I went, hearing Bach's St Matthew Passion at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, my city, Edinburgh by night. Recently I was impressed by reading Andrés Trapiello's "Madrid", a magnificently written and documented love letter of almost six hundred pages to that city. And Warhol, and Picasso.

Standing in front of the painting of a Campbell's soup can in the museum of modern art in Zurich gave me a strong jolt, it moved me.

Why a can of soup? New York, the frenetic energy, the jazz, the exaltation of the everyday, the rhythm of its inhabitants, the contrasts, the human relationships,...

I am a scarce reader of fiction, but an assiduous reader of essays, chronicles, biographies and knowledge in general, and a contemplator of museums, exhibitions, books and art documentaries, mainly from the 20th century and the present.

Anyone who knows me will know that my character moves between the phlegmatic and the colloquial, but what I show interest in is because I really have it. I am far removed, and not only by age, from what might be considered a "cool" or modern guy.

The thing is, for the same reason that I've been writing for years - as a good friend from Madrid says, "in Spain there are more writers than readers" - I've been trying to create some kind of art, specifically through photography, for about the same number of years.

I had three exhibitions and two of my works appeared in a national newspaper and others in digital art magazines, despite boasting perseverance, I was tempted to give up, until the guy who is now my partner, Polo, came along and today, and since 2020, we have this artistic project.

Photography and painting in acrylic, assembled through digital techniques, with ironic, aesthetic motifs and with a predominance of ambiguity.

I make a point and a part to deal with this concept: ambiguity.

I cannot understand art as something obvious, nor that its creator "explains" everything to the beholder.

  • Another point and aside.... On one occasion, we were a group of people of different ages, meeting to practice French, and we were talking about human beauty, and one of the attendees said that he couldn't tell the difference between an attractive man and an unattractive one, to which I replied "if Brad Pitt -the young- walks through this door now, you'll be left breathless, and you won't be able to see him, and not because he is a well-known actor, but because the physical archetype he represents is so powerful that it shakes your unconscious until it leaves you speechless, and not because he arouses any sexual interest in you but because he is extraordinarily beautiful, and the same thing would happen to a woman with another woman of such magnitude"-.

And one of the aspects that distinguish an evolved being from another that is steps below is the possibility of perceiving beauty and wanting, loving, loving dearly, without the need to go through any kind of desire, a person of the same sex.


This is a subject I insist on a lot because I claim aesthetics and affection as non-sexualised values. In fact, I have always considered myself more of an aesthetic conservative than a moral conservative, although they often go together.

Let's go back to ambiguity, most of the works that you can see in this gallery need to be interpreted by the viewer.

They are not a hieroglyphic but can be "read" from different perspectives and each one from what he or she desires, from his or her prejudices, emotions or reasons.

And, obviously, on an aesthetic level they will be seen in one way or another, depending on the viewer's taste.

The point is that they all have a critical basis from a social perspective and are clearly ambiguous, or at least that was our intention.

Literature, art,.... It's a question of dedicating time, perseverance and a certain degree of passion, nothing more. And then the results are what they are.



D. Ruiz

Barcelona (S), 2022

 

 

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