In the beginning was the print, that is to say, light and the heat of the body on a surface: the rocky wall of a cave. Later, the ephemeral linen cloth of the sand of the beach, the soft flesh of the clay or the red tattooed flesh of a face, a shoulder, a man, the dry epidermis of the parchment, the infinite plane-aleph of a sheet of paper… Marks, impromptus, registries of the man-man, the man-boy, the man-insane, of the man-artist, energy-stuck like a layer or an epiphany- to the surfaces of the creation.
However, time has passed and weighed upon us. Continual growth and the new technological tools are the protagonists, especially those of digital genealogy which have excessively illuminated on many occasions due to their complexity and sophistication, some distant and anonymous artistic products, some auras that are too cold, an almost total absence of colour and human warmth. The disappearance of that print, of that light. Thus, the físility, the manual temperature, the body of the material, seems to beat a retreat to its winter quarters (or its hell), from the electrical and virtual attacks of technology.
Let me remind you that even, at the beginning of the last century, André Breton asked the question. “Why have we to become slaves of our own hands?”, with which he apparently condemned to the exile from the Planet Art languages like drawing and painting..
Nevertheless, and in spite of continuous Death certificates made out by their everlasting (eternal)grave diggers, the truth of it is that drawing, as an expression of the immediate and the spontaneous, of gesture and of idea, and of painting is that pure and hard task of narrating, living and explaining to the world through the magical art of colour, of canvas and of paper. They are constantly reborn with new force, new ideas. We then discover that our hands need not turn to us their slaves, as Father Breton had feared. Hands think and can open doorways we have not dreamt we could cross.
I am sure that in such a chimerical and exciting company Angel Haro finds himself pawned. The search of that primeval print, of the physical and psychic presence of the hand, as an extension of the spirit, the vestige of the gesture as if it were a shadow cast over the battlefield of these paintings. An arena that our artist has consciously reduced to the skin of the paper.
Within the strict orthogonal limits of each picture many things happen. We cannot forget the area of the rectangle, it clears itself by simply multiplying its base by its height. But the area of these works, that is to say, the space of painted representation, requires much more complex formulae of composition and technique and much less foreseeable.
A strange balanced mixture (mix) of gestures, outlines, rectangles, scrapes, stains, rhythms, lines, crosses, trajectories, ovals, squares and circles make up its prosody. The cost of passion, of struggle and fire is cunningly compensated with the refreshing discipline of “Madame Geometry”.
Georges Braque once said “I love the norm that corrects the emotion”. Why don’t we complete it?: “The norm that corrects the emotion”, and “The emotion that corrects the norm. It is that dialogue, sometimes difficult, sometimes peaceful, sometimes a monologue which has been a constant that runs for years through the geography of its paintings. Thus, the structure converses with nervous and expressive gestures, the tectonic melts in the unformed, the dripping white blood inseminates the views, the straight line changes (transforms) into a curved line, the arabesque germinates into a checkerboard and reticule…..
Have they stopped to contemplate the ardent skin and the electricity of the light that covers these papers and almost physically illuminates them? We can feel its heat when we survey them with the yolks of our eyes, the tips our fingers. Erased light, veiled, blackened, watered down, semi-concealed, reticulated, soiled, hurt by architecture and the ironwork of the black pastel and oils, but it is light in the end and always will be. Square-windows, oval-viewpoints, rectangle-thresholds are ignited and are extinguished like an urban and nocturnal landscape.
At first, Colour has not been received too well in this fiesta of paint. The words of the night: grey, black, electric white, sepia …have talked over a long time. These are phrases of the dark, of twilight, of shades, of absence and forgetfulness but also of illumination, epiphany, blinding white, flashing albino. It seems that in his latest works Haro Angel it has opened the hunting season for colours, certain colours. The red ones, with almost all the shades, almost all the names: crimson, amaranth, ruby, purple, flesh, garnet, vermillion, scarlet, red, maroon, have taken possession of these new territories. And next to it, a warm cut of yellows, oranges and salmons giving heat and colour. Blood in the eye, blood in the picture, blood in the blood.
I know that Paul Valery considered drawing, poetry and mathematics as the three great human creations. This is odd, because I also see them in these paintings. I see the drawing, in the physical outline, in the handiwork of the concept, the importance of the material, the definitive role that the paper plays. I see poetry, in the modulation of the colour, the doors that are opened and they are closed, in the lyricism of the line and the stain. I see the mathematics in the rigor of the forms, the construction of the space, the binary code of the colours.
Furthermore, I see cities, I see marked interiors, I see wounds, I see melancholic funkiness, I see riotous dreams, I see the Sargasso Sea, I see sonorous forests, I see ballads, I see a world of spare parts, I see a field of stars, I see igneous and a great red-whiteness, I see a dream web, I see a rhapsody for a white angel-haro-. I see, I spy and what about you, what you see?
for the 2004 exhibition "On paper"
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