TANGO and FLAMENCO
“Art is a lie,” insisted Degas, “the air you breathe in a picture is not the same thing as the air you breathe outside.”
The Tango series is the first one I did when I was finishing my Fine Art Degree in National Art School Sydney. I worked from the movie "Tango" of Spanish director Carlos Saura. A couple of years later I revisited the subject of the danse with a new series Flamenco Rehearsal inspired by "Blood Wedding" of Carlos Saura.
To capture the movement I observed the french modernists, and in particular Degas the master of the body in movement.
I remained a traditionalist in my methods, a “follower”, working selectively, composing my pictures from drawings.
Aspects of my work present themselves as a transformation of some apect of the tradition, aspect that I tried to understand deeply, to be able to dismantle it, split it from its context, and reconstructing it, infuse it with meaning and freshness.
I am ultimately searching for a sort of verisimilitude of mood, or of deeper emotion. Attitude is everything – attitude of physiognomy or posture, of the feeling of the moment shared by viewer and subject. The works then exists as complete emotional pockets of being.
I applies intellectual rigour to my art, yet these figure drawings and paintings seem unguarded glimpses into my private world. Each time I move the pen, charcoal or brush across the page, I take a risk, setting out in quest of the unknown.
“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion” says Diebenkorn. Mistakes are made, lines are erased, and their history remains faded reminders that a struggle took place on the page or the canvas.
The gesture of turning to the other, of inventing a movement with another whom you do not know and cannot anticipate, is a gesture attentive to a silence in which you are exposed as a body in motion. My language is what I reveal to you in the intimacy of the work, a language that introduces you to a movement I call my own, that invites you to respond to a direction I initiate.
Dance operates as a metaphore for the distances we place between self and other, through which we attempt to delineate a different way of facing the other, a different way of belonging in the world. The gesture is a moment in language that is not exhausted in communication, it exceeds language, exposing communication incommunicability, capturing language in moments of silence, expressing the muteness inherent in humankind’s very capacity of language.
More than a style, more than a manner, of fingers or hands, you will find here a movement of the body, a syntax that calculates without calculating, to encounter things, to be in the world, and to touch it without touching it.
