(Pintura Peruana en Berlin)
The Temporary Gallery Berlin
22.09 – 22.10.11
Una larga mirada
Lima, septiembre 2011
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A Long Stare.
The core of the painters who are now exhibiting at The Temporary Gallery Berlin –to which other artists with personal and coherent proposals have been adhering- have had the opportunity of showing their work in Germany last year, specifically at El Pacífico gallery in the city of Stuttgart; and within months, some of them will be in a different show, also in Berlin. Therefore, this first exhibition of Peruvian Painting in Berlin, serves as a pretext to briefly reflect on the libertarian spirit of that first German pictorial revolution; the Expressionism of The Bridge and how its essence still remains now, even after more than a century of its founding in Dresden, on June 7th, 1905, by the architecture students and self taught painters Bleyl, Kirchner, Heckel y Schmidt-Rottluff, who got to the point of mixing gasoline into their paints, seeking to express as fluidly as possible that which their longings demanded. These daring artists forged more than a century ago that desire which is still alive in humanist painters, who seek to renew the traditions and not to replace them with cheap tricks; and who, in spite of new academicisms and officialisms, search in their inner selves the unique voice of their works. Die Brücke is formed in Dresden to then move to Berlin. There, Lieberman and Corinth, from the Secession, ruled the artistic environment of the expiring empire and against them, Die Brücke rebelled. And even when the French echoes, Gauguin, Matisse, Van Gogh –Nolde advised calling the group Van Goghiana instead of The Bridge- persisted and impregnated from beginning to end the work of their leader, Kirchner –whose whole life grumbled about this and whose countrymen, like Max Beckmann, reminded him of every time they could- he called himself the most German of the group and there is no doubt his work defined what we understand by default as expressionism, as German painting. This ontology of the image that the German painting goes through without exception from the times of The Bridge in Moritzburg up until the current and greatest figure of the School of Leipzig, Neo Rauch; and that reached Auerbach and the recently deceased master, Freud, both Berliners of birth and that infused the expressionist character, just like the French Fauvists with the Germans, to the whole School of London, which influence remains and expands among new generations of painters across the globe, working its way through various obstacles, as it is natural. However, like Cézanne said, art is not nature itself; it is a harmony parallel to it. It is exactly because of this that the painter builds his or her life around painting. Painting lives in the painters, in their works. A painter holds dialogs with his colleagues, with his teachers and mentors, through his own work as well as through the work of others. All the history of painting is a long conversation without words, a long stare - the school of seeing, which Kokoshcka avidly promoted. Painting is transmitted and survives from painter to painter in a sort of pictorial tradition, instead of an oral one. And here it is appropriate to also mention the copious amount of papers and documents written by the painters themselves, expressing their pictorial thoughts in texts found in the midst of their processes. We can find their conceptions about art in their correspondence, diaries, all that verbal magma that shines an intense light on the appreciation of their work but that never –since no text can justify a work of art- defines it. Because of this it is a cheap fallacy to claim that painters don’t study, that they don’t do research, that they don’t theorize. All of the masters of modern painting, and speaking only about this period, since Cézanne to Arikha have left writings, reflections, about the trade of the painter from their own experience*. And if there is something that brings together most of the painters that are now showing at The Temporary Gallery Berlin, is precisely that eagerness for Painting, for diving into it, through exhibitions, books, conversations, writings, art collecting; eagerness for finding themselves within the torrent of the artistic tradition and drink and recognize its sources in spite of the occasional, but necessary and healthy, differences and even quarrels among painters. Furthermore, these painters seek to be open and share what little can be learnt, discussing readings, discovering new talents, new spaces; all of which should not be misinterpreted as acts of vanity but rather as an effort for sharing with kindred spirits that which interests us. For all of this, I am convinced that some of these painters will end up being bridges between that which has been lost from the essence of Painting and that which can be recovered in the work of the future painters: youngsters that right now are fighting and struggling in their art schools, in their studios, in their own daily experience, in order to find a little corner in the midst of centuries of painting tradition when this is not politically correct according to the despotic keepers of contemporary art and the imposition of a new and nefarious official Academy that looks down on the fundamental individualism of each painter. Out of this struggle emerges a brave Resistance that develops incipiently in Lima but that has achieved various victories in artistic centers like New York, London, Barcelona, among others. In this context, and to end this presentation, I return to the memory of that revolutionary artistic community founded in Dresden, in the words of the historian Norbert Wolf: “…They called it Die Brücke (The Bridge), in remembrance of a phrase by Nietzche from Thus spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885): “What is great in Man is, that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in Man, is that he is an over-going (ubergang) and a down-going (untergang)...”
IVÁN FERNÁNDEZ-DÁVILA
Lima, september 2011
translated by: Eduardo Deza