Mesetario

When José Díaz showed me this new series of works he talked about the ‘round painting’ which, according to him, is practised by a number of artists, though each one understands and undertakes it in their own individual way. He spoke of the ability of painting to accumulate different times, of how the past and the present are interwoven in one single skin, where the first is last and the last is first.

He spoke to me of Paul Klee’s assertion that painting is a “grey point that will leap over itself.” Of the way of facing the painting and the stance you adopt in front of the canvas. Of how points of view can be simultaneous, when a frontal approximation and another more bird’s-eye view give shape to a spherical circuit. Of how we need the means to make this visible, just like we need a satellite or a microscope.

He insisted again that painting is round. “Only the canvas is flat,” I guess.

He claimed that at the outset of his career he painted caves that were not caves and that now he had not painted caves that are indeed caves.

They comprise a suite of large-format oil-on-canvas paintings in which ideas on circularity and flatness, as well as information and narrative, come together in a series of forms in search of iconicity beyond figuration and abstraction.

One can discover a map or a portrait, a cave or an outstretched skin. A pool or a net, sad faces or a pointed vault. A pareidolic narrative that is at once everything and nothing. José Díaz makes use of resemblance to give shape—not to compose—a number of paintings that juxtapose concretions, perspectives and faraway worlds in an essential, organic and mixed way.

A thousand plateaus, like a thousand paintings.