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| Universo de la memoria, mixta 59" x 75" 2007. |
By: Abil Peralta Agüero
Each
moment of social, political and cultural history of humanity is
expressed as a print, a stamp or an emblem in the artistic iconography
that man, in each of his respective degrees of civilization, marks in a
cavern, a wall, marble, cloth or wood.
That
is the case of the extended iconographic gallery that the lower
Paleolithic man left recorded in the gallery of images tha magically
expresses the primitive intuition and drawing in the caves of Lacaux and
Altamira. This can also be seen in the aesthetic memory of the Hellenic
art, Romantic art, Italian and Spanish Renaissance, French Romanticism
or more recently in the dramatic critical manifestation belonging to the
aesthetic codes of Modern Art.
As
a link interacting between the most diverse proposals and typologies of
the history of art, we warn that the theme, the critical thinking of
art focus on the affirmation of drama and the social commitment as
direct referents of human redemption needs. Humanity, through an
invisible voice claims and will always claim the artist as the most
authentic holder of the voice that thinks for everybody.
The
dominican painter Natalia Conde, discovered by the dominican master
sculptor Antonio Prats Ventós, has decided, according to what her
pictorial signology projects, to be a particular artist. Not an artist
from the peripherical history but one of those who take the
responsibility, the right to rip the veil of human
conscience, claiming the truth of faith, the depth of wounds and the
painful signs that have marked history from the time of our origins,
expressed through individual and collective violence, love erosion or
war wickedness.
She
is an artist who sensibly prophases the urgency of peace and asks for
psalmist actions against war in her hieratical pictoric scenes.
Natalia
Conde's neo figurative formulation gets drama as part of an epic and
solemn vocabulary that from her orphean atmosphere denies all theatrical
scenes in order to be translated or to evoke a climate where symbol
prevails. All these achieved from the fornulation of aesthetic phenomena
expressed through the potencialization of spectral light, dense color,
sectional glaze, vaporous texture, internal drawings and a volumetric
movement near the sculptural rhythm in the anatomic exposition of
bodies. Exposition that in Pero della Francesa or El Greco succed in
slating visual phenomena ruled by a strong internal plastic tension.
Her
painting emerges from the exercise of a focalized look to the substance
of conscience of history. The windingly shape of bodies that she
designs, structures and integrates in her cloths, a delicate volumetric
form, creates states pertaining to the spectator's eyesight from a
tension between volume and movement. This is provoked as a perceptive
phenomenon seeing in a “gathering” way, the dramatic mass of naked
bodies manifestating complete absence of psychological action.
By
using chromatic resources, shown in her cloths as alchemic colors,
abrasive, almost sour, we can appreciate vibratic and long mystical
transubstantial figures due to non-visible flares. These flares have
taken away materiality from their souls. Her art is emotive and
spiritual, enriched by the iconic images of solid bodies that lead us to
critical thinking.
These
are, in her works of art, bodies that in their lost of faces retain a
enigmatical identity that could be any of our faces. Faces that show
possible victims in any scenario from the war of violent barbarism that
today attack humanity from everywhere.
Her
daring chromatism, treated over the cloth as fotagge, harmony, spirit
and the dramatic splendor of her compositional structures lead us to
remember the mass of angels of “Asunción” shown in Cinquencento Corregio
or Rubens' flamenco in his celebrated painting “los horrores de la
Guerra”, painted by the Duke of Toscana and where the painter wrote
“this lugubrious matron dressed in black is the unhappy Europe sad for
so many wars, rapine, outrage and misery”.
The
artist enlarges the composition of her internal architectural harmony
with the balance of tones and dominant rhythms that accentuate in her
dramatic and symbolic spectrum the overlapling of nude bodies that take
and reflect light units. These units provoke powerful reflective
sensations and mystic states in the spectators, both over the pass of
life and the terrible auto destructive capacity of humanity.
1n
occasions the painter, showing her great dominium of volumetric and
visual composition, constructs scenes in which we perceive mixed up
bodies horizontally, diagonally and verticality. This last expositive
linearity is accentuated by the dramatic plastic movement of motionless
bodies ready to lay on the floor, showing a strong symbolism among the
fragility of life and human condition.
These
dense plays of luminic effects provoke a cataclysmic sensation in the
perceptive look. The artist gets them from her capacity to administrate
the force of her interior drawing, stylistic resource that she makes
prevail both in her works of art with a strong dramatic accent and in
those where she celebrates the ancestral identity or manifests the
unsoundalbe laborious study of the orphean.
In
Natalia Conde's art acts and plastic initiatives operate over the
cloth, from her personal perspective, her aim at the conscious
destruction of the visible world and it’s later reconstruction. This is
her way of activating internal forces that are true to her creative
identity, getting closer to the complex aesthetic phenomena that Paul
Cezanne defined as "Pettit sensation".
Drawing,
design, equilibrium, rhythm and romantic compositional structure, plus
her intuitive and sensible administration of the foreshortening in her
bodies, make these paintings owners of an atmosphere usually defined as a
state of permanent evaporation, personal creation. Natatlia Conte's art
is near symbolist painting, gathering the aesthetic priority with the
social aspect, holding consciousness clearly defined in her semantic and
visual temperament.
The
capacity of linking sources from reality and from the unconscious, lets
us appreciate her stylistic phenomena as sensitive experiences ruled by a
strong philosophical sense of humanity, existentialism, and spirit.
This
is as if the artist wants to set up the dream republic in her canvas so
as to prevent scenes as dramatic and apocalyptic as the holocaust, the
Balkan war, September 11th.
We
believe in this kind of aesthetic, philosophical and conceptual
manifestation. Her sensibility and creative conscience makes evident in
each of her canvas rigor in design, constructive spirit, dynamic harmony
and wise games that lead her art to states of equilibrium and depth.
All these features speak very well of her creative capacity as an artist
who all along her career has preferred developing a discrete artistic
personality, away from the banners that announce the more and more
complex show of art in our days.
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"Sobre las huellas, camino" Museo de las Casas Reales. 22 de Marzo de 2005.
Santo Domingo. República Dominicana.
