The Painting in the Eye
El Cuadro en el Ojo
Gonzalo Vélez
Uno Mas Uno, 1991
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Collage as a starting point: a set of images separated from their context, from their specific realities, that are manipulated by the author, recreating a new fragmented reality, a metaphor of the incitement stimuli we receive every day through mass media. Without any sense, inhabitants from the cities develop defenses against all these information, thus, we act indifferent or disinterested, or we even indiscriminately reduce its value when we receive it. Eric del Castillo's experimentation aims to become an uncensored exhibition of the atrocity, in order to demystify it and show its daily nature and our indifference before terrible things. But the irony is disenchantment, the imperious search for purity is shameless, the scream of a religion which gods have died.
An angel walks through the city contemplating its debris, confirming La Destrucción de Sodoma (1989-90); by stepping away from the spectator's back scene, allowing him to see the remains of a building: stones, cables, steel beams, a torn column with pieces of rod showing. In the first plane we see a post on a latticework, and by its feet, a corpse; on top we see a street lamp with a working bulb. There is always movement in the Castle's paintings: something is about to happen; all the tension is contained in the instantaneous action that has been captured. Even in San Sebastián (1989), who can be seen only from the thighs to the neck, penetrated by three arrows and enclosed by a barbed wire, blood slowly decants down the wounds, delineating the body's volume. There is a need for movement where creation emerges in the performance field: first with El Sindicato del Terror, and then with Los Escombros de la Ruptura. In the performance, his actions are aimed towards a conceptual development, and both objects and movements from the participants acquire a symbolic value. Thus, half a dozen of masked performers become an unfolded personality of Van Gogh, and in simultaneous actions there is a Van Gogh's puppet being manipulated by Van Gogh the puppeteer, while Van Gogh cuts his ear off amidst a turpentine smell, and Van Gogh reflects with a revolver in his hands.
From the collage to the painting; from comics to performance, or from painted stones as if they were remains of an ancient temple. A sadomasochistic naked woman threatens with a whip. Somewhere else, several characters gaze aggressively from a painting, because Eric has revealed them in their intimacy, out of their working hours from 9 to 6 in the comic book stereotype. There is a series of acrylics that show the streets, but from above. That is how an angel would observe what happens in the world: like an accurate eye from an artificial satellite. Not the fronts but the rooftops. Only heads walking on the sidewalks, the people move their briefcases, the noses aim to the office. By their feet a grille suggests a sewer as if it was a slipperiness of the street, the street as a whore dressed with beads of torn paper and the seductive hole interviewed behind the metal grilled panties. Then we see indifferent pedestrians rushing at 9 am.