A panegyric upon a painter & friend´s production

- Damián Ibarguren Gauthier -

by
Dayman Cabrera Sureda

first cover: the first women
oil on cardboard (0,40 x 0,30)

Damián Ibarguren Gauthier was born in 1970 in Fray Bentos, the capitol of the department Rio Negro in Uruguay. The major part of his childhood he grow up in Buenos Aires. Between 1980 and 1985 he lived with his family in Ronneby, Sweden. He got his first lessons in drawing and he took part in various activities of drawing within school.

1985, after the reintroduce of democracy in Uruguay, he returned to Fray Bentos. 1990 he moved to Montevideo for studies at School of Architecture and since 1993 he works as draughtsman within CSI engineering.

Ibarguren is a self made painter, without academic education. The main part of his paintings has so far been painted on recycled material, especially on cardboard found by the streets or given to him by his enthusiastic supporters.

The exhibition now shown in Ronneby, the city that has been his 3rd home country during five fertile years, is the 1st outside Uruguay. In Montevideo he has had several exhibitions and he has planned for more this year. Some of his paintings is in private collections in Uruguay, Spain and Sweden. A praising review of his work has recently been published as an introduction to the exhibition of his paintings in Vintén Editor’s virtual gallery at www.vinten-uy.com.

pimp
oil on cardboard (1,25 x 0,60)

In times when dissolution is present and the established power of culture, undemocratic and authoritarian, is in decay. They are constantly in for cutting the budget for art, because “art is not eatable” and instead building an “non-power”. At this time appears within the painting society a bold and inspired painter who is destabilizing at the current aesthetics thinking. The undersigned have been brought the task to join the artists call by using the power of words to broaden his audience and make him well known because of his own value.

To talk and use words about painting has always been a trespassing of the land of lines and colours. The words can’t do no more than going roundabout, since it always conjures away the reality. However, I accompany the eruptions that the strokes from his brush bring about. Damián Ibarguren paints first then he exists. He says that people often give comments about his painting that he never thought of before and it puzzles him that people see things he doesn’t see or has imagined. People also associate to objects, persons and situations that he had no idea about. He likes to listen to the comments from them who watches his paintings because then he learns to see on his paintings in an other way.

Once I heard him say that he painted only because he felt for it, and that he after a premier sketch on a cardboard went away to find the unexpected and that he put his trust in that the inspiration would guide him all the way. It mostly happens this way and sometimes wanders the cardboard around in his room, waiting for a better moment assisted by the muse. Time goes and when he is in lack of new cardboard he takes up earlier projects and starts an intensive painting at their backside. In this way his paintings can get two-sided and contains his illustrated testimony from his struggle with the idea. This stimulates him.

That's right! The ideas. A word spoken by chance under certain circumstances makes the storm inside his head breaks loose and starts searching for the expression through a formation that he imagines. He goes through the same process as his audience do before he works, with the difference that he turns it into an oil painting. The observer stays there too and thinks about what they see and feels thrown towards their own horizons. Suddenly it finds company among his persons, his children and the well known that has been placed in accidentally. It follows his intuitive-

she sleeps
oil on cardboard (0,71 x 0,52)

-balance and his way of compensate the living colours with the soft colours. His paintings are a celebration within colours. They are a challenge even for the most prepared intelligence. Now and then it reminds about a resurrected Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), in a higher pitch, provoking, bold and disrespectful. Ibarguren has his own theory around colours and accepts no compromises, even if he slowly makes changes to improve the effect of his style and sharpness, but not for giving up his own direction. He works towards time. It’s not only about capturing a vision, but he must avoid that it disperses and then there is no other cure than to paint day or night.

I see in front of me a recently done painting, “The 17th September” wish characterise his fathers funeral: In this painting the horizon is burning in orange coloured tones to the left from the viewers point - the painter observes the scene from a certain distance – and to the right the last light of the evening is coloured light yellow – it symbolises and follows the dead persons way to the graveyard. But in the foreground, in front of the colourful surface we have a juvenile crowd of people framed by Fray Bentos majestic entrance.

In Damien’s painting the most people are young and at his own age, dressed in colourful dresses – in neoclassical style, painted in white, while a large group of mourning relatives pushes to come in and to follow the procession. As a sign of sorrow and comfort we see a women embraced within another women’s arms, while the graveyards stonewall vanishes describing an unlikely curve. Damián as well as Christopher Columbus think that the world is round, the perspective is then spherical (stereographic), you might say. This celebration has its source in his dreams that followed the sad funeral the 17th of September 2003. In the half sleep, in the dawn, between two lights, this shining celebration to his father began; also he was a painter, to be painted.

“The point of escape” rigorously respected to compose, compensate the peculiar effect that the surrounding line creates in his spherical perspective that allow us to watch all sides of the three-dimensional objects. The person who enters his paintings through one of the always-present doors, enters a planetarium where we can see the reflection of the unseen colour in our grey lives. The difference is that zenith not is hanging over our head but is right in front of us, a bit displaced from the cardboards geometrical centre.

Behind us there is nothing more, everything is in front of us to be looked at in the smallest detail, even those things that we cannot discover because of the limitation that the straight lined spreading of the light creates. The painter is always present, surrounds the objects and wraps up them in front of our amazed eyes, with completely naturalness, as if he said: “ If Columbus was-

promise
oil on cardboard (0,80 x 0,60)

-capable of getting a egg to stand up I am capable of showing its whole roundness”.

Damián Ibarguren could be classified as a “neo-impressionistic” painter with even a strong “expressionistic” accent – if this would make it easier for the temporary reader or spectator. A rough straining after effect pointillism rules and reigns in his paintings. He tries in that way to catch the reflection of the light, the moment that destroys and reduces the detail. Not even when he places us in front of a foreground does he give us details about possible persons, but instead he shows us ideal and concrete faces at the same time, in brief moments.

The caricature is sometimes merciless as when the artist paints the masculine lecherity´s devilish character. He has painted some paintings where his subjects are the naked man and women, sometimes together in bed or exhausted and resting after a day of making love. The formation of the man with the look of the devil, which is typical for the Christian iconography, reddish and even equipped with two horns, is peculiar and suggestive and also interesting for the amateur psychoanalyse. through an absolute domination over foreground, announces the male the successful occupation he just completed, with a gesture of triumph. Nothing can be more against the fur towards the existing antimachism.

On the other hand, is it worth to bring out the women’s rest after had taken the male by will. A fine example of this is “modiglian” characteristic is the painting “The first women”, a painting small by size but with a big portion of attraction because of its simplicity. In his paintings doesn’t the women show off when winning  but instead expressing it trough the body’s devotion, with identical conviction but no excitement contrary to the one that blow one's own trumpet, accepting a place in the background among the folds of the sheets.

Ibarguren is a man that know nuance’s, who already know that life is reflection and action united with the always present illumination from hidden, the rare. He already know that the way of art is long and that life is short. Never the less he paints all the time, poisoned by his minds.

Within one of the booklets that has been written about his paintings there is a story about the birth of one of his latest paintings, painted this time not on his usual cardboard but on classical framed canvas that he found in the street and on which someone had pasted a poster. When our painter-

drinking mate
oil on cardboard (1,49 x 0,80)

hall
oil on cardboard (0,80 x 0,60)

-walks there and back to his work, he goes looking for something, observing the relics of the city, as a paper’s collector, searching for a cardboard in good shape and with a size that satisfies his imagination. Someone that paints with his frenzy and tempo never has enough material, always lacking of oil colour; but the only thing he doesn’t lack of is inspiration.

He paints the persons “by surprise”, this is the case in the painting, in large size, “El taita” in which a father, husband or a friend leaves a house, while a woman with her two children watches the action, from the hallway in the background. The painter’s intention is obvious while the move is shown in a light way. This painters reality doesn’t match the photographs but is pictures of the daily life in which all thing continues to be animated by it’s own motion and it’s own history. The painter lives in a white heated world. The colour confirms this.

The persons in his vision hasn’t posed for him, that’s why he desperately wants to compress, condense all levels in the landscape, all vibrations, by catching even the lightest moves. The reality’s that his imagination creates is completely probable and has our times electronically and virtual touché, as it should be in his generation. The experience to animate pictures is commonly known just as the-

boat and mate
oil on cardboard (0,79 x 0,67)

autumn
oil on cardboard (0,73 x 0,91)

-cartoons language and is educationally used at the cutting edge by the media. Therefore, even if he himself doesn’t admit it, Damián sends out his message: Dare to animate, the reality exists because we can create it and give it life through the computers energy of bytes.

If this source of creation and this compelling of the virtual or cybernetic art feels heavy, the painter himself offers us an elegant way out of this problem in the way that his compositions, in any visual corner, has a window that contains a landscape or something else. We can slip into one of them to look for necessary peacefulness after a session of astonishing consideration. Sometimes it’s a round window in focus that has the same function.

That’s why Damien’s work should be watched slowly, because there are paintings that are filled up with baroque fantasy. No one should be pleased after the first impression; looks at all details and look at it one more time, just as it like in a kaleidoscope once more appears in new shapes.

It’s not painting for academics, it is placed within the universal stream of disarm, as in all of today’s art’s and culture’s spears.  Not as a childish rebellion action but as a democratic and democratised true gesture. Not-

17th September
oil on cardboard (0,92 x 0,40)

Eaves and clogs
oil on cardboard (0,80 x 0,59)

Carlos dream
oil on cardboard (0,60 x 0,40)

the swindler
oil on cardboard (0,80 x 0,50)

-to produce lots of empty generations of painters but instead try to obtain new ones, more of human syntheses, even more familiar with the youths of today’s true dilemma, that has the modern power of electronics but at the same time a future without a history, cultural dwarfs, crazy by consumption used as a cure-all against pain, accomplished by the material and spiritual crises that our country suffers from.

Maybe will those in power one day be painters, poets, musicians, dancers, writers, men and women of various sexual temperament and reverse to that they can’t be lawyers, clerks, doctors, members of parties, architects, economists, chemists, agronomists, engineers and so on.

To choose the art is the most mature rank of action by the one that one-day will be an artist. That is the proof of the genuine artists consciousness, because of that the reel knowledge is unspeakable what matters to soul and senses, it’s transformable but not through history of knowledge. Even those who use words to create, confirm this statement. Damián Ibarguren serves art and by that he hopes to find a way to express his experiences of life.

backside cover: king Momo
oil on cardboard (0,52 x 0,85)

Vintén Editor / Minilibros
Printed at Impresora de los Pocitos
Despósito legal 326.758/04
ISBN 9974-570-90-5
Hocquart 1771 – Tel.209 02 23
Montevideo – Uruguay
April 2004
© Daymán Cabrera
© Vintén Editor
© Illustrations: Damián Ibarguren
Translation: JH2006