Notes on the descriptive specificity of Darwin Estacio Martínez
“My paintings are images. The valid description of an image
cannot be produced without guiding thoughts toward their freedom”
René Magritte
Darwin Estacio Martínez is a painter par excellence, a learned connoisseur of art history who develops his descriptive concept, his constitutive reflections, within the context of the history of art. He follows the descriptive tradition that some have declared as obsolete, but he continues to develop a painting style whose goal is not entirely illustrative. His main concerns are not limited to visual considerations, or to the nature of the visual perception. He is, first and foremost, a narrator (every work is fiction), he produces visually designed stories, a series of tales (as a shrewd social observer) that reflect certain impacts of the world and the attempt to restore it to that which is visible by the handprints (to rephrase Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
As Jean-Luc Godard said, “the painting stands in time,” and we know to what extent Godard brought closer and combined cinema and painting. Darwin attempts to do so, but in even more ways. Each of his paintings, with a real timelessness, is close to a movie screen insomuch as it receives beams of light that reflect and is charged with colors and images to depict that which is invisible. Darwin is a painter of the surface, a plain and even one, his paintbrush does not go through the skin of his characters, it just rubs it, and he limits himself to their appearances, their expressions and “postures.”
Darwin confronts us with a purely psychological space, where the unconscious prevails and creates for the onlooker a peaceful doubt. Darwin´s is a poetical knowledge system that provides us with a state of consciousness of the sensations, as Henri Matisse wanted, which simultaneously evidences two antagonistic or complementary constructions, or at least links with each other, and achieves its goal, calling our attention upon the old enigma of the signified and the signifier.
His paintings highlight the pure physical beauty, a beauty having a specific structural function: to create an “appearance” of beauty causing a temptation rather than a fascination, and which exists not to be admired, but to excel. The absolute perfection of the surface of Darwin´s paintings, their seductive clearness, their voluptuous monochromatic colors, and at the same time deprived of their distinctive look and emotionalism (plane transparency which is the strangling of eloquence, as Georges Bataille would say), serve to dissipate the anguish contained in their depths. The desire to paint is manifested in Darwin as a force of presentation rather than a representation strategy.
The influence of René Magritte in Darwin´s work rests on the intensity and the impact of images that make us reach an expressive strength. In his painting, the human face is not present, deprived of its true identity. In fact, this work is not about Man, it is about mutilation and violence suffered in the imaginary order. Paradoxically, his characters, his figures, seem estranged and at the same time known, they are timeless and contemporary, they are as if they were out of the world, out of time, without chronology, they belong to the space of art.
The poetic strength, the allegorical, objective sensuality, the unusual, enigmatic, thoughtful, melancholic feature of Darwin´s paintings give life to a complex process of internalization, emotional and reflexive at the same time, in which the levels of metaphorical meaning are brought to mind through the specific painting, the singular descriptive reality. That which is insinuating the unusual, the enigmatic, becomes archetypical; there appears a consistent micro-universe, poetically efficient, mysterious, that refers to the fundamental human constellations. These paintings are deliberatively installed in an indetermination, or rather in an ambiguous fashion, that which is not shown is as important as that which is visible, it is a known fact that the watchers are the ones who produce the paintings.
It is quite clear that the style is the emanation of the painter´s spirit. Darwin insists on the usage of a mental style, his paintings representing his own style of expression and its meaning lies in its perfect autonomy whose specific weight and objective significance can only be addressed by the work itself, for that which is expressed in a language cannot be so in another.
Darwin paints signs of pure color that constitute a materialization of the vision and the memory, an aesthetic veiled epiphany where that which is figurative is the fugitive and unstable apparition of an immemorial permanence.
François Vallée
Rennes, May 2017
The Restlessness of Anonymity. Genre Paintings or Painting Genre?
Text by Chrislie Pérez Pérez Havana, July 2012
This is the question that is immediately raised by the set of pieces belonging to the equally titled series "Genre Paintings" by artist Darwin Estacio. The connecting thread is the reflection on issues concerning painting as a manifestation that is part of the visual arts; but above all, it refers to the decentralization of typological subdivisions within it, such as portraiture, landscape, and still life. From this perspective, his work dynamites the conception of the representational character inherent to it, transferring it to a reflection of an introspective and egocentric nature, a look at itself as part of a sensitivity that deals with the laws of art itself, if it were possible to speak of laws in this term.
The works of this artist constitute a provocation in their essence; from the fact of questioning the function of painting as a genre to the content of the image shown as the result. It could be said that within this subversive spirit, in the good sense of the term, Darwin's works use a very particular strategy to influence the viewer, which could be called the phenomenon of the restlessness of anonymity.
It is well known that a quasi-morbid relationship is established between what is shown and what is hidden, even generating states of expectation that translate into the development of a universe based on speculation; very much in tune with his purpose of denying the idea of absolute truth sometimes attributed to art under the influence of an auratic conception of it. His spirit devoted to polysemy bets on the development of this speculative universe, which is why we are in the presence of ambiguous painting, in which the viewer takes an active part in the process of sign decoding. By this, I do not refer to a militant stance of public implication at the level of action, but from the subjective universe, that is, thought.
The viewer is a coauthor of the story that Darwin tells us, or rather, sketches. These are frozen scenes of events with temporal continuity outside the work, that rather than saying, generate questions. The characters, imbued in dissimilar situations, always seem to have something to decipher, a kind of dark side. On the other hand, the clues for the reconstruction of events are manifested through winks, subtle references, which must be "detected" in each of the scenes.
In the formal aspect, his works are resolved by large planes of intense colors, which bring him closer to the aesthetics of Alex Katz, but it is also possible to determine a similar treatment to magazines or advertising materials, such as immediacy, clarity, formal cleanliness, and the power of synthesis. What stands out the most is his tendency to deny the identity of those represented, because in reality, his philosophy is to create a different portrait, far from any convention, based on the maxim that a man is defined by what he does. It is not possible to elucidate then if these pieces should be classified as portraits. To some extent, representing individuals connects him with a more conservative stance of assuming the genre; however, the fact that they lack a face, functions as a negation. His characters are not individualized through their physiognomies, for him, it is not important, and, in this sense, he approaches the work of Magritte, due to the same disturbing effect that his figures provoke, although the treatment is different in each case.
But anonymity in Darwin’s case is used essentially not only to dynamite the traditional conception of portraiture but to speak to us of a group identity, established based on the actions they perform within the work, and which become clichés. These are constructions of certain social "types" through elements that are common to them and largely from a standardizing perspective. The standardization and the tension between the antagonistic pair annulment/affirmation of the self, the self that is diluted in the others. In the communicational aspect, the focus of attention is decentralized, transferring to the poses, but above all to the hands, which become fetishes and protagonists of the entire scope of the painting.
“Genre Paintings” are then scenarios of deceptive simplicity, where a game of concealments occurs both in the literal and figurative sense, in which restlessness is recognized as a strategy to draw attention to aspects that imply painting as a genre but also transcend its boundaries.