TENSION AND INTENSITY
(A Consideration of the Painting of J.M. Velasco)

The hermetic drive is contemporaneous with the movement toward sociologism, the “political rhetoric” or the agreed-upon scandals that have caused marketing (be it in a parodic key, trying to dismantle or merely to integrate) itself to become neutralized. Once again the question of the hic et nunc/here and now of the work of art arises, what sort of presence it may have in an era where the gaze is becoming digitalized. Today banality is made sacred, in that period of suspension that is consumed in what we would call, parodying Barthes, culture degree xerox. Baudrillard spoke of a sort of transaesthetics of banality, a kingdom of insignificance or nullity that can lead to the strictest indifference. Art is spewed out in a spurious ritual of suicide, a simulation at times visibly embarrassed, in which the banal increases its scale. After the heroic sublime and the orthodoxy of trauma, there would appear the ecstasy of the gravediggers or, in other words, a third-degree simulation. And there are nevertheless tremendous possibilities for painting, above all when we get away from crude prejudices and the taxonomic attitude that is, to a certain extent, a form of close-mindedness. After the neo-Wagnerian “installer” and when the saturation of the photographic has been perpetrated, people speak of a “magnificent return” of painting or even of a pictorial vitamin that perhaps is the acknowledgement that that creative practice is far from being forbidden territory. Only the decadent inertia of fashions or pure critical ineptitude lead one to assume that materials or “languages” are, in themselves, legitimating or a guarantee of intensity. Far from the anguish of influences or the vertigo of fashion, referring to his interior expressive urgency alone, a painter like José Manuel Velasco demonstrates that it is still possible to devote oneself with lucidity and energy to the battle of the painting knowing that it is fertile territory.

José Manuel Velasco has a very physical concept of painting, inherited from the driving force of abstract expressionism. Deleuze points out that painting has always used and drawn lines without contour, like the drippings of Pollock that were understood as nightmares fixed in space. Pollock’s drip is a manifestation of energy that must be controlled whereas the use of stroke and color in José Manuel Velasco, tremendously energetic and fairly close to the approaches of Franz Kline, are supported by a unique confidence in chance. The painter frees the paint onto the surface, hopes that a particular settling will take place: painting is an irregular spreading, whose origin or hermeneutical key has been lost and whose law is incapable of being formulated or expressed. That horizontality, prepared for action, that Pollock inaugurates is certainly a place of profound impressions that demands a “haptic vision,” a touch that, nevertheless, keeps its distance. Velasco wants to be there, placed integrally where the painting is happening, in a dance that generates territoriality.

When we look at a painting, we see a concatenation of gestures, the superposition and organization of the materials, the yearning of the inanimate to come to life, but we do not see the hand itself. The image is an immense, wordless poem, on that surface are the events at the mercy of gravity: in a certain way, each painting is born of a conflict between opposing forces. There is no other point, in this world of shadows and solitude, than the painting itself, the viewer has to go deep into its interior, find him or herself at the mercy of the displacements, feel the attraction and the dissonance. What is in question in modernity is not, as has been shown many times, the images, but rather the gestures: many have been lost, others have become definitely pathetic. “The being of language,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “is like a huge memory lapse, like an incurable lack of words.” Gesture is a pure medium, something that can be understood as power of exhibition. Specifically, the gesture of painting is a movement laden with meaning, free movement that has something of an enigma, arrow, road, sign, route that coincides with the destination of the gaze. Flusser points out that the act of painting is a moment of self-analysis, that is to say, of self-awareness, in which having meaning and giving meaning become intertwined, the possibility of changing the world and being there for the other: the painting to be done is anticipated in the gesture, and the finished painting becomes the fixed and solidified gesture. The paintings of José Manuel Velasco are genuinely driven, in them gesture and blot are everything; the figurative sketch ends up letting itself be led into more than abstraction into an embodiment of passion. Kandinsky speaks of an abstract figure, of a figure that does not stand for anything other than itself or, better, a figure that has internalized its own tension. The dramatic quality of emptiness (the whiteness of the surface) and the frenzy of the dark stroke, chromatic accidentalism and certain geometric notes, produce in the tense works of Velasco a kind of romantic enthusiasm and simultaneous stillness and calm. The tempest of visions has stopped apparently because the painting imposes an extraordinary restlessness on the person who looks at it.

Painting is an affirmation of the visible that surrounds us and that is continually appearing and disappearing: “Possibly,” John Berger writes, “without disappearance the impulse to paint would not exist; for then the visible would possess the certainty (permanence) that painting struggles to find. Painting is, more directly than any other art, an affirmation of what exists, of the physical world into which humanity has been thrown.” The corporality of painting has an expressive potential that is difficult to compare to anything else. We can think that painting is in a position to be a stage for the expression of personality and individuality provided, as I have pointed out, by its rooted and established corporal nature; in the latter instance, painting can come to act as a metaphor, even as the equivalent of sexual activity and, of course, it is the scene of a tremendously energetic psychic projection. What painting handles or, better put, that which it approaches is the imagining of absence or, in other words, one of the decisive moments of the painter’s search is the delineation of space.

José Manuel Velasco names, in the titles of his paintings, emigration, integration, sleep. The African earth from which the dugout boats depart in search of a place in which to make a living is one of the poles of the drama, the other, the one that becomes unbearable, is hunger and death. Painting attempts, with neither literalisms nor trite slogans, to allegorize restlessness. Perhaps the violence of the gesture is, ultimately, a manifestation of rage in the face of something so unacceptable. But this artist wants also to welcome the dreams, the Utopical dimension of the journey, that desire to believe that things can change. Freud pointed out that, after complete interpretation, each dream is revealed as the fulfillment of a desire, that is, the dream is the hallucinatory realization of an unconscious desire. The creation of symbols is a partial understanding by denial to satisfy, under the pressure of the reality principle, all of the organism’s impulses and desires. Dreams partially restore the kingdom of the pleasure principle and trap us bringing us the abyss of the massive sublimation, of tenderness, of the torn memory of the womb. Certainly, there is a knot or labyrinthine structure that separates us from the clear vision of what is dreamed, as Freud himself might point out, the navel of dreams is the unknown, something that lies beyond the reticulation of the intellectual world. In his latest paintings, Velasco allegorizes climate change, pointing to a crucial problem of our times. His intense painting does not cease to turn to the human skin of the world, to that land from which we arose and to which we inevitably return. The colors, the gestures, the strokes keep teaching us, as in the prehistoric wall, that the visions of what we fear and of that which we need are there. We have to learn to affect what is happening to us, before it is too late.

Fernando Castro Flórez

Translated by George W. Startz