Private landscape (Mara Mira)

MEMENTO VIVERE

Angel Haro is an artist aware of the importance of the titles of his works and exhibitions. His studio walls are hang with sheets in which he writes possible paintings´ titles. He knows that with the words we can distinguish universality from particularity. A dichotomy in which philosophers from Platon are totally wrapped up in, and a fundamental issue in the Arts History since symbolists, late 19th century, demanded generalized practices out of their particular views of mankind. Besides, in the 20th century, titles can not be considered superfluous. After the success of Parisian halls, cataloguing was imposed and thus images became dependent on written words. Haro thinks that titles supply viewers with additional information so that they can understand mentally. Images´ sensoriness becomes trapped by the conventionality and language specifications. As an example, two years ago, in his exhibition entitled El futuro fue ayer (Future occurred yesterday) in Sala Verónicas in Murcia we were warned that the future is like a canyon blowing us while it moves backwards, towards the past. Its bullet, as any vector, should follow its direction. Our sense of time goes from left to right, exactly as our writing. The left side is the past while the right correspond to the future, which changes, nothing can stop it, it will always be in the bullet horizon. The past also moves: unnoticeably it goes further and further from us.

His new work is entitled Private Landscape. Haro knows that the cornerstone where modern nostalgia is built on requires images from the nature. It seems to represent what humankind could have been if we hadn’t lost the course of the future. That straight line in which very few believe in. A landscape and a nature he has pointed out:

The landscape seen by the nomad (the artist) is a hunting field. Since his first glance, he has to assume his survival. Firstly he examines its structure, the main elements articulating its order, then its arrangement, and exploration possibilities. His senses strained as a bow are ready to perceive any movement or change (light, color, heat, smell, etc...). It´s a landscape lacking myths because memory is needed for their existence. It’s a landscape of instincts.

Thus, the landscape is a hunting ground in which Haro recognizes himself part of a collective. Collective are attached to the past, but a single person lets himself rocked by the nostalgia of memories, of the privacy. There is nothing new. Many artists are solitary persons who repeat: this will die. They work with the vague, deep, and calmed sadness of melancholy. An emotion capable to cover everything.

Memory is an inevitable sentiment. Nostalgia is the distrust in the future but melancholy is purer because it doesn’t refer to any specific image. It’s the only sentiment that misses the present time (...)The melancholy that arises from some works comes from the exercising of activating disillusions. One starts with a splendid concept of life and ends resigning oneself to a little of silence in order to listen to oneself.

When Haro writes it he is aware of the genuine solitude, the doubt against the newness, and without any ideological prejudice. A solitary person recognises himself misfit. He teams up with anybody. He only follows his heart. Perhaps the above items may suggest a poetical vision of life, on the contrary, it´s something physical. John Cage relates that when he was invited to enter in a soundproof chamber in Harvard University, he heard two pitches of a sound: low and high. The engineer in charge of the chamber told him that the absolute silence is impossible. The low sound corresponded to his nervous system while the high sound to his blood circulation. It´s not possible to escape from our own body´s fluids. We do not only listen to our interior but also to sounds reflected from our own voices that the space returns to us: confronting the echo we feel naked. And in front of his look´s echo is where Haro is standing in his landscape.

He works on a big wooden pannel in his studio. This vertical support is over two metres and was built in October, 1999. It has been collecting the marks of his creative work. The wood keeps past stains, irreversible marks layered conforming a cartography of the ephemeral past. Photos of the pannel have been taken and the negatives developed on acetate. They are not ordinary photolytes because they have been stamped with a printing machine 1.20 x 1.60 metres in size. The technology Haro uses is accomplishing its last works. When Haro starts this series he kows that this machine will stop working some months later, December 2001.

Now, these photolytes in which his drawing board appears are placed on the pannel, exactly in the same place previously occupied by the papers that left their footprints. Haro paints on his own babblings, on the spot that trespassed the boundary, on the unconscious part of the creative fact. Then he closes his painting in a box. Its methacrylic surface reflexes what is in front. It is necessary to approach to see the painting well. When the series is over he will left the printing house.


MUSIC

In order to work, The music isolates himself from the world. Sounds promote his creativity. We could say that an authentic synesthesia occurs between his painting and the music he listens to, mainly jazz. But the artist is conscious that none of our senses represents a domain of homogeneous perception. The concept of synesthesia (sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color) is, in many cases, a false work argument. Nevertheless, he thinks that painting as well as music have their own tonality: from high to low, from strong to soft; it can be lyric or dramatic. Haro, as Rousseau, considers that colors are in the space while sounds are in the time to vanish. His relationship with the music is physical. He dances in front of his composition in a consciousness state rather automatic, letting himself be carried. He understands that music unchains trans-sensorial perceptions which do not belong to any particular sense, but a sense can be contaminated by another sense, without being trapped by the boundaries of that sense. He knows, for example, that rhythm is everywhere around us. It´s a basic trans-sensorial dimension we even perceive before being born when we listern to our mother´s heart. In addition, texture is one category of this perception because it is the most tangible quality of objects, before their color or shape. Texture is the core of things, hence his admiration for Miles Davis, fascinating musician of trumpet´s limpid, sober, graceful expression. Haro usually says:

Nobody before him has expressed the human being solitude. The painter meets himself in the trumpeter´s sonorous permutations. In this whirling entropy in which order–disorder happen, slow-fast movements, either conscious or chancy, are linked. Moments in which shapes, however, tend towards a structure that can acquire a non-definitive meaning, non-fossilized, alive as an organism shouting. For Haro, music is the symbol of a perception passing through our senses, likewise, going beyond its frame and giving the impression of continuity somewhere. Many sonorous occurrences are chained, masked, or superimposed in time and space, in such a way that it is difficult to split them in order to study each part separately . This tangle of sensations is what Haro searches for in his paintings: the consciousness, subsequently, of the occurrence we see all of a sudden.

I have noted down the link of music with Angel Haro´s work due to his conception of art as a temporal process. His paintings shows the marks of his creation process, his genesis. Now we know how?, but what happens in the pannel?.


TIME

The 2 x 2.5 metre wooden plain is his Private Landscape. A landscape the artist fells ready to disappear. To preserve it, with complete verisimilitude, the artist orders to fotograph. It is interesting that this step is accomplished by a professional. He pretends to register the reality objectively. The artist seeks an extreme accuracy in these images since photos do not only fix our mementos but also our against-mementos activating forgetfulness. Images developed in photolytes, that is why they will be black, gray, and transparent. And on these, his painting as interference.

If there is a texture to define the XX century it is that of interference. Everything is interferenced: landscape, love, journeys,, dreams, time,...There is always an element that should not form part but becomes part of the new nature. An oil spot in the sea. An electric post in the forest. The past in a love. An accident in a journey. We evolve into interferences of our own dreams and these in interferences in turn of our life.

After reading the above artist´s statement written in his diary, It is no surprising to understand how he has reached the transgression process in his last production: the photo changes into a photolyte is the painting support. The interference of a support, of the means, of a time. The painter entrusts to cut the time in segments of present to a photographer, to shoot the clock as a Parisian in the French Revolution. The photographer confirms that the present is no more than an evanescent instant and insists in trapping a moment that, at the moment of being materialized, has become another present. Entrusting the photos to somebody else, the painter lets the photographer stop that instant turning it in the corpse of the eternity: when nothing happens; when everything is postponed indefinitely; when time changes into time. There, where the pure repetition is glimpsed; where everything has been postponed, emptied of any content. A record player repeating once and again the same melody.

In the filmed image of the pannel, reality becomes trapped as a precept. Nevertheless, forcing even more the sensation of loss, Haro films posteriously the photographer´s images with a printing machine, that is going to stop working soon. Now, I doesn´t work. It has been withdrawn from the world, devoured by the latest technology. Thus, the painter emphasizes our belief that modernity is a complex interaction between progress and nostalgia. Somebody would refer to this as melancholy amazement but also reactionary melancholy. It emerges as a consequence of affective conflicts. Laying away any stuff used that, being useful, should be replaced by the latest. Haro reveals against such imposition. He decides to preserve memory.

MEMORY

It is known that memory, a psychic power to keep and remember past events, is connected with the central nervous system because it organizes the necessary mechanisms to elaborate information in sequential steps. In the first step, the sensory perception should be coded to be transmitted. The third step, comprising association and abstraction, functions as a cocktail shaker mixing previously stored information and patterns that should lead us to the synthesis, the final mixture. Next, the storing process, as a drawer we open to evoke, either, positively, in order to remember, or, negatively, to forget. Any reminiscence is settled on the ruin of what it previously was. On the construction of the past. Memory settles on what has been written, on what has been built by our mind associating and abstracting data to rewrite them: a passage in which words are added constantly. A field plenty of spider´s webs that, with their fine textures, are composed of a light layer of superpositions in which there is always place for one more. If a filament breaks down, it can attach to another web. Anyway, though it breaks down it could be supported by the others. Memory is resolute when the spider´s web is steady and tight, however, it is also obscure and resolved when it becomes a mess, a greyish ball. Some events are remembered perfectly while others come fragmented: a puzzle missing pieces.

We have reported that memory opens spaces. It´s an odd puzzle that stores vague and clear information. A palimpsest continuously increasing. Memory is stuck by remembrances that can be activated unexpectedly as sleepers who wake up because of any past mark. A smell, a word, a sound, a color,.....anything can be a mark, everything provoking an emotional revivement. Out of all remembrances, those in which the man revives past events through dreams or deliria are the firmest; since logic does not take part those past events are placed in the present. The human being experiments them with the same strength. Besides, It is known that whoever finds difficult to sleep it is also lossing memory. To be awaken to forget eveything. Have you ever suffer from insomnia?. It leads you to think, to remember what scapes. One strikes on one idea and repeats and repeats it going down without end. The Insomniac muzzles his body to the present.

To establish our memories we should dream and get into a shade world in which future frees from past and past from future. A junction where everything is possible. Images can be so clear as reality but also vague and nebulous. The only state in which we can see a single image or more because any logic possibilitiy of time is fractured. The images Angel Haro presents in Private Landscape are install in our memory opening and closure. The have been oddly placed in that understanding junction that aproaches dreams.

Haro works on a material condenned to disapear, in a space that he will abandon. He works in the time against the time. He´s like a insomniac remembering what he knows will be forgotten. To achieve his task, he manipulates an etherial material that, in some ways, evokes the dreams´ world. He has changed the paper´s white surface, confronted everyday, by the image of that creation wall which has become his painting´s support. It could be in honor, a farewell too, of the space that has embraced him so long; in fact it´s just a continuation of his work. Haro has been noting in series of notebooks -fragments quoted have been extracted from. Within them Haro writes, sticks, keeps images, passages...with the purpose of remembering what he wants to remember.

There is a perverse pleasure in expoliating images turning their shapes, lights, and shades to the material world. Substracting these images leaving them without their history in order to check their real evocation power. I like then appreciate their brights, fissures, the density of their spectrum.

In his notebooks, drawings, notes, collages, thoughts, quotations and bits from newspapers. This reporting on the present would be the final work for many artists, for Haro it is only a part of his task. The first time you see these notebooks you feel you are in front of a color explosion but this impression vanishes when going deeper. Actually, they are obscure with a conceptual density that will be exalted in the later painting. Such greydish feeling increases when we notice the enormous quantity of press clippings: writers´ opinions, interviews, scientific articles,...nothing scapes from his curiosity. He thinks that any newspaper can be poetic material: the only fact is that it is not properly ordered¡, the painter states. This task of collecting the present and the reality leads him to the pannel he paints on.


PICTURE

On the photolytes´ shades world, Haro deposites the fluid movement of painting. Now his calligraphy and gesture are shown as a writer of ineffableness suggesting that a passage advances due to whatever is on its back. Thus, writing, scratching the surface, the painter defines himself physically. From the woof, lines, he ruins the belief that the image prevails against the substance. Against the formal contundence of the photolyte he superimposes the geometry of what is alive, determined with softened and velvety lines. Lines that seem to be bathed by light and vapour (a line that dreams, as Paul klee would say).

Here we can follow the trail of Haro by the Piranesi´s imaginative architecture. Haro is captivated by Pinaresi´s chimeric architecture, fantasies evoking and experimental past, a non-existence antiquity age. Piranesi wonders about the
project possibility, his projections are not attached to specific results. His works are open to debates. This arquitecture can not be assumed by a real praxis so that it should be confronted and understood from the imagination, utopia, drawing, shapes, lights and shades. For Piranesi, the old shapes are not a testimony of another time, their knowledge helps as a reference to supervise the present. He announces that the ruin is a success that necessarity we have to refer to.

He fells fascinated by his Carceri´s penumbra and brightness. Since he searches for a certain formal indefinition in his structures, he wraps the architectual elements leaving the botton in a complete ambiguity. The artist´s gesture muddles the line till it losses its sense becaming an space. The spider´s web over the spider´s web extending in a space far from what is the visible. The space as an experience. That´s is why we should not be surprised that on his pannel Haro writes in capital letters the name of the Russian Dimitry Kolésnikov, author of the note I m writing in darkness. Also, some of his works are dedicated to the Russian astronaut Gagarin. From the sky to the bottom of the sea where the nuclear submarine was engulfed. Perhaps, has the utopia run aground?.

On the photo, Haro explores the sense of the painting. Not only the lines but also the colors which get expanded, the wave reflected on the surface. The painter smears the photolyte with the color. Big spots of a single tonality trapping the diffuseness of Grey shapes at the back, fossilizing the universe of shades that would be hidden in the films. In the front part we are forced to see the material´s roughness and sensuality. The credible eventuality, the artist´s adherence to the ethereal photolyte. Certain areas are totally covered with scratched painting using a building palette; others he sticks yellowish nappies with a fine texture of spots. In both cases, they seem to be uncovered injuries . Intense and rational areas in color that structure the composition turning it squared. Such color spots directs the spectator´s vision towards a specific point, in which the artist´s physical action develops and the graphic event gives birth, denouncing an art in which the body is engaged and the present time vibrates.


TRANSPARENCY

We started analyzing the pictures´ background following the logic they have been conceived with. From the bottom onwards. One action after another in front of the spectator. However, to puzzle them out, the opposite process should be accomplished. From outside inwards. As archaeologists uncovering layer after layer. Time after time. Firstly, we see reflecting surfaces, methacrylic mirroring what they see: the exposure space and we approaching that space window. In order to see the painter’s creation we shouldn’t look at our opaque bodies, rather strip of our obvious and disturbed present. Introspection is necessary, abandon our present in order to achieve his. The reflection intervenes between the painting and us. Haro aims to entrust us with his painting’s secret, hidden from ordinary life flow the surface screens. As a lover crouched by a fountain cooing telling another his/her love without being heard by surrounding intruders. We should cross the mirror to get into Haro´s dreams. Only in a dream we can meet madness and paranoia. Also in a dream, our self appears plenty of experience. A dream always belongs to someone. It starts from the experience to escape from the logic. Logic paralyses the kingdom of creative thought, tyrannizing, and imprisoning it.

I have decided to create myself an autonomous thought fed by the common sense and utopia. In such junction, I believe that a territory worth being lived through and remembered without being ashamed can exist. Fortunately, my work allows me to build an internal structure. My painting’s usefulness is the construction of a landscape speaking clearly about me, with a spider’s web preciseness in permanent mutation.

These are the painter’s words who knows that logic is only a branch of consciousness, that can be encouraged through method, game as well. Artificial intelligence only possesses logic. But I doesn’t go beyond because, sometimes, logic does not support logic, neither the world. Somewhere emotions should be located, intuition without any boundary. Somewhere painting should be. To find it, the spectator will better abandon his/her blurred glance, stand up and look beyond its reflection to enter in the work space. He should overstep the continuum of the reflection to touch the discontinuum of the time. Unmask the present to look at the picture.


Interview for the 2001 exhibition "El paisaje privado"