Everything I do results from visions that come from high above in the air, from the zenith, just like an all-embracing gaze… It is, precisely, this reflection of Audino Díaz’s that gives rise to the series Paisajes Mentales, carried out during the first half of this year of 2008, the latest exploratory endeavor by a young artist interested in nature and in the mark man leaves on it, expressed on canvas as if a human cartography that discovers the essence of Being-Nature by means of canals, wells, roads, vectors, quietness and mysteries that hold or lead to water… I began to dream of these landscapes a long time ago… I have been working on this theme for seven years… A theme which he first explores using stone, then leather, later using wood and now cloth, based on the concept that the medium on which the work’s surface is structured forms part of its artistic and symbolic complexity. He enshrines Paisajes Mentales within a minimalist design that moves between the figurative and the abstract… a series that I sense to be my purest work, emphasizes the artist, [because] it submits the pictorial structure to virtual geometric operations with the greatest economy of means, with diverse geometric and organic forms crisscrossing in a schematic net of sketched lines that intertwine.
Audino Díaz’s exploration of the aesthetic arises after meditating on what man leaves behind, starting from a hypothesis linked to nature and to a supposedly original morphology of a place or a space inhabited by human beings. From the profound respect he manifests for the material he utilizes, with its own color, texture and structure, he gauges the raw canvas to create a collage made of natural fibers, pieces of cloth, pencil, leather, beeswax—thus generating a subtly basic aesthetic that evolves within the profound rite of silence that is the purity of the art surface; here, the action and presence of the ins and outs of sewing are also important in the external configuration of the same.
Seen as marks left by man in the space of his spiritual and earthly existence, the artist creates landscapes that are not immediately discernible to the spectator’s visual perception but that are indeed discernible to the emotions that arise after receiving the code to the profound mystery therein contained. In the end, they are a cartography of the memory created by obsessions that lead him to reach for the unattainable, the infinite.
Audino Díaz’s concern for the environment is a constant element in his work, specifically because of the great harm inflicted by man on Mother Nature, condemning future generations to live in the precariousness of a devastated universe, without greenery, or water, or flowers, or the beauty that keep man in touch with life and with his own spirit. From this source, so intensely inspirational, he extracts a good deal of the conceptual subject matter which he translates into existential diagrams that implicate the artist himself, his context, his obsessions, closely linked to shamanic rituals: with regards to the occult side of a piece, the artist pays attention… to that parallel reality, to what is magic, occult…In this sense, Díaz’s work could be linked to a contemporary aesthetic that substantially modifies perception by establishing symbiotic relationships between symbolism and the senses, between the human and the divine, represented by the magnificence of nature and of water as a reality on the way to extinction. Thus, he develops a system of appropriation and re-appropriation of images evoked as vestiges of what has survived on Earth, perceived as anthropologic aerial and mental examples locked away in the subconscious, always following varied specters that range from analyzing formal values to conceptual ones, inciting the invention of an abstract style to communicate with the spectator—from the perspective of the real, naturally. He defines ambivalent and polysemous images on canvas as enigmatic and mysterious centers that safeguard the occult and religious meaning of the subject matter.
If something serves to characterize Audino Díaz’s work it is his artistic and poetic discretion. Its mysterious and apparent simplicity holds the complexity of what he senses, what he thinks…there, the artist immerses himself in the reflection of a universe of signs to be discovered…therein lies its mystery. It is incumbent upon the spectator to make his own conclusions based on his own solitary experience.
Bélgica Rodríguez
Caracas, July 2008
Title of the exhibition: Paisajes Mentales
Curator and text: Bélgica Rodríguez
Museography: Bélgica Rodríguez / Audino Díaz
[Translated from the Spanish by Laura Romeu Ondarza.]
