PERSPECTIVES
L'Instant d'Avant (The Moment Before)
There is obsession, obstruction and decadence in the oil-drenched paintings by Dayron Gonzalez. Drenched not with fluidity but with character, huge swathes of compositions, vanishing lines and textural constructions.
Obsession: with strokes thrown down in complex layers, ready to dissolve under an unavoidable weight.
Obstruction: of the gaze, whether through eyes that are unerringly blind, a gaze that is one-eyed or covered with expressionist smears, or through a painterly gesture suddenly frozen, tortured, overwhelmed by an unspeakable compulsion. Is the Cuban artist using these luminous sub-layers to mimic the limitations of an island state grappling with its extremely arduous communist history and deep-rooted economic crisis? Because the smears and the maelstrom of stretched, scraped, compacted and blurred oil prevent the narrative from peacefully running its course. Obstruction: of identity and, therefore, of freedom. Happy family is a large canvas depicting a bourgeois interior with five family members whose faces are unrecognisable, ghostly. Smiling girl the eponymous smile has turned into an uneasy, almost monstrous trickle. Is this the artist’s acidic irony? Happiness, which might have been achieved through the lavish intensity of the colours, is irrevocably distorted. Reality is blurred, memories fade.
Decadence: in the how the scene is set, tilting over from an everyday motif to an intimate, devastating torment. The background fractures and tears like a dilapidated and time-worn old wall, a ripped-out press clipping whose visible folds become shimmering abstractions, or a colossal, uprooted trunk, a metaphor for the uprooting and solitude of an exiled people.
There are two possible readings of this. That of the traditional genre scene, with hints of the traditional themes of art history, whether portraits, more historical scenes or newsworthy images gleaned from the Internet and already deeply-rooted in our collective memory, or that of a more intimate, memory-based archaeology. The title of the exhibition, L'Instant d'avant (The moment before), asks the question: is this a moment we are trying to find because it contains a shred of the dream that we no longer have in our sight? Is it the break before the fall? Dayron Gonzalez's paintings place the gaze in a permanent, time-based tension. The painter is a keen observer who depicts human behaviour that merges into distorted abstractions with exuberant, deliberately tart or even bloody colours. The unbridled agitation of the deconstructed faces clearly owes its inspiration to Bacon. And even more tangibly, the use of fluid marble effect and chaotic, broken-up scenes are an obvious nod to Adrian Ghenie, a painter who was also damaged by the history of his country: Romania under Ceausescu. All of the paintings scream in a leaden silence, howl but remain inaudible. Lovers of neo-expressionism will appreciate this painterly turmoil, which whispers of social and political upheaval and contradictory personal and collective memories. The paintings attempt to explore a tumultuous historical narrative made up of tragedies and thwarted dreams, a narrative sometimes denied by the powers that be. Dayron Gonzalez is a representative of the young Cuban scene and part of this painterly lineage. From a formal point of view, he would even appear to vindicate it, so striking is the aesthetic similarity to his celebrated forbearers. Here, the paintings pay tribute. He is one of those artists who use universal, symbolic images, which seem to flow from the press or the Internet and are characteristic of our channel-hopping age. The works evoke dramatic emotions and are embodied by a style that is at once supple and rough, and laced with melancholy and private rage.
Julie Chaizemartin
Journalist and art critic
Paris, October 2022
Dayron Gonzalez’s artworks are intense reflections on the nature of representation, public and private memory, the construction of history, and the shifting nature of identity. Gonzalez focuses on the psychological power of painting in works of startling visual impact and conceptual resonance, characterized by dynamic and mutable formalism.
The subject is humanity – portraits, self-portraits, anonymous figures, historical figures, figures in nature, figures in interiors. Gonzalez’s figures embrace both the profundity and the ennui of existence – popes and presidents, politicians and partygoers, children and the elderly. We feel the melancholy isolation of these figures, balancing static silence and gestural cacophony, underlining the dichotomy implicit in painting – realism versus illusion, image versus meaning.
Through his work in general, and his portraits in particular, Gonzalez interlaces visual metaphors and values of the past with those of the present. Gonzalez reveals an intensive self-dialogue — an honest explication of the banalities of life, untidy thoughts, and everyday experiences. Unconcerned with the finesse and preciosity of detail, Gonzalez focuses on how the exterior can reveal the interior. Each painting grows out of successively reworked images, buried beneath subsequent marks and erasures. This labored and deliberately messy process scars Gonzalez’s figures and robs them of their identity, individuality, history and memory.
Blurring, slashing, dripping and erasing are conceptual constructs Gonzalez employs to ignite connections. Subjects become provocative, emotional images of transient beauty as well as elegiac suffering. These paintings distill the energy of restless, fragmented thought into ordinary chaos, part imagination and part surrounding world, mirroring the shifting, unpredictable nature of life.
Wendy M. Blazier
Art historian, writer and curator
Miami, October 2022
Interview by Emmanuel Hoen
Where were you born and where did you grow up ?
I was born in Cuba in a small town close to Havana in 1982. I used to draw a lot when I was a child. It’s something that I have always enjoyed.
When I started university, I studied industrial design for a year but, after realizing that was not what I wanted to do, I applied to the San Alejandro National Art Academy and got accepted in the painting program. I graduated in 2007 and shortly after moved to the US.
During my time in San Alejandro, I was part of an experimental art group. We concentrated our practices mostly in contemporary medias such as performances and projects that did not require a lot of supplies as they were hard for us to find in Cuba. We basically expressed ourselves, at that moment, with what we had. It was not until I arrived in the United States that I started to paint as a sole practice.
What kind of drawings did you do before art school?
Anything that would catch my attention and I have continued to find inspiration for my work this way. If an image strikes me, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific theme or object, I try to represent it on a piece of paper with a pencil or charcoal and sometimes this could be the starting point for a painting.
I don’t come from a family of artists, so I had to fight to be taken seriously. It’s hard to be the first one! It was not easy to legitimize myself as a full-time professional painter.
When I started my painting career I used to paint in series, basically many versions of the same memories and things that had happened to me when I was younger. As time passed by, I started to move away from this way of painting and I now work on several subjects at the same time.
How and where do you work?
I have my own studio and my most preferred time to work is during the night. It is when I can better focus on my research. I am also a night owl so that helps!
My studio is not close to my home so when I am there, I try to make the most of my time. A work session at night usually consists of really loud music, any type of music although my favourite is rock’ n’ roll, a good number of cigarettes, coffee and sometimes a glass of wine…! The night usually goes by really fast!
When I arrive at the studio, I usually start by looking at photographs, pictures seen in the media and this gets me in the mood to get started. Sometimes I also do collages by combining my own pictures with pre-existing or even historical ones, hence giving them a new context.
I usually don’t leave the studio until I am satisfied with what I am working on so the time spent in my studio can be long… Sometimes it stretches to non-stop sessions of 24 hours.
Can you tell me about your future exhibition called L'Instant d'Avant (The Moment Before) ?
L'Instant d'Avant (The Moment Before)consists of a group of paintings where the main theme is portraits, some of them are surrounded by landscapes and some others are in interiors. The paintings for this show belong to different periods. To me, the most important things are invisible to the eye. This is why the portraits are hardly recognizable.
What was your first contact with painting, and which artists do you admire?
My first contact with painting was when I was little and saw a very old photograph of my grandmother that was painted with colors on top of the photograph and that impressed me a lot.
There are many contemporary and also not contemporary artists who inspire me such as Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Cecily Brown, Adrian Ghenie, Peter Doig, Anselm Kiefer… I also find inspiration in the powerful paintings of Joaquin Sorolla, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Ilya Repin among many others!
Interview conducted by Emmanuel Hoen
Editor at Artcento
Paris, September 2022
ARTIST STATEMENT
“Human behavior is the main point of reflection in much of my work. I am interested in the way in which people’s past defines them, and how it gradually becomes like sediment as time goes by, continuously in our memory, mostly shaping us into what we are today, now.
Our personal experiences are not the only occurrences that shape us into what we are, how we react to situations and how we evolve. History as we know it is also part of our past; therefore, it also conditions us.
My work process begins in a very sensory way. I usually collect images that in some way impact me visually. A poster on the street, a photo in a magazine, or simply surfing the Internet can serve as a source of inspiration. I appropriate these images; recontextualize them within my work, taking advantage of the metaphor to give it a new connotation in a new visual environment. Pretending to create a starting point for new stories and thus demystifying the real story behind each of these images.
I also attempt to create situations that lead to reflections on human beings as containers of their own story, but in an intimate way; starting from the premise that everything we consume of the world at first sight works as a kind of mirage. When we observe someone, we perceive features of their physical appearance, but their actions are what define them as a person”.
Dayron gonzalez
Miami, October 2020