Some Reviews
(On Diego Donner’s paintings)
Painting, is well known, supposes a plane. A single plane which the artist invades with his colors, his textures, drawings, shades and strokes. It does not aspire to volume or a third dimension. It supposes, additionally, the abolition of time. It proclaims instant presence. It permits and demands the glance. The plenitude of the eye, the integrity of the look and the chromatic splendor of light are its manner and domain. When it evades limits, greater or lesser, mural or miniaturesque, painting then makes a gesture, it becomes transgressing, it crosses categories and it enters the visual arts.
Corseted within the barriers of the frame or the wood that tightens the canvas, enclosed within the perimeter of cardboard or wood, the picture, the painting, the work cannot escape its space, its natural habitat, which is the plane.
Diego Donner’s painting does not reside in a single plane. Or if it does, it does it in a paradoxical way. It is not the magical solution of perspective, much less the trap that the trompe l’oeil, simulations and hyperrealism set for the eye. Diego Donner’s paintings are palimpsests. Palimpsests, that is what they are and by being so, they introduce one more dimension to the plane: the temporal dimension. Palimpsests that, by nature, require the construction of multiple paintings on the plane of the painting. Time documents, temporal planes, palimpsests or grafittis because inscription, drawing and painting are superposed in Donner as layers that the passage of time has left on the plane.
In this artist’s work, you can see/read various discourses, multiple
registers, several superposed inscriptions. This is a superposition that does not involve chaos, though. In Donner, images dialog between them as if they had been rescued from a mixed box, as if the artist had collected them casually, as if it were a chaotic discourse. But it isn’t.
There are no haphazard happenings in Donner as there is no chaos or confusion. In his paintings, diversity is not the result of chance. The aesthetics that dominates and organizes images has nothing in common with the fortuitous meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table, nothing in common with Lautréamont’s chance.
The multiplicity of elements and references, of allusions and representations does not mean a bet on the baroque either. The distinct coexistence, the varied presence, the numerous presentation of images build a look, a standpoint in the face of the contemporary world, and in the face of history, an organization of the multiple and the diverse.
At the same time, that standing facing the world, that organization of the diverse proposes a look that registers and inscribes something like a superposition of traces, as if it were a matter of collecting the multiple layers of sense or of the senses that contemporary life has been building.
Traces, inscriptions, painting, writing.
¿Writing? Not necessarily. They are strokes, rather. Figures, fragmented signs, loose words, traces of discourses, signals, strokes that represent traces. Traces that inhabit the pictorial space.
One can see/read a personal world. One can glimpse the signs of a personal world. One can also half see collective signs, figures that refer to known worlds, recognizable images. Or maybe not. One can see/read a fragmented world. One can glimpse the broken signs of a personal world that are also the traces of a shared world.
One can see/read constructivist or torresgarcian traces, one can recognize Buddhist or pre-Columbian symbols, one can even assume the presence of diverse homages, children’s writing or signs, hopscotch squares, ladders, half-signs.
One can even believe that it is all about the evocation of urban landscape. As if Donner had wanted to recover for the space of painting those “ready made” that at times can be or could get to be the graffitied walls of our city.
One can see/read in those strokes the traces of other worlds. It’s not the concrete world of a wall any more, not the world of painting or the personal story, but the hidden world: the dark or brown side of every individual. I am not referring to the near or far mystical world but to the hidden world, to a universe concealed hidden behind so many strokes, a sort of significant core veiled by so many lines.
But is that not what many artists seek? Isn’t that what many suppose Art searches? Art as an ideal, as a restorer of the daily chaos, as a healer of constant aggression. Art, or in this case painting, as a safeguard. The stroke, then, as an exercise in evocation. The stroke, then, as a spell; the stroke and the trace as an answer to anxiety. The stroke and the trace not just as a proposal of the aesthetic but as a proposal of life. The stroke and the trace as a way of life and not just as a form, as a mere plastic resource.
All of this can also be mere speculation. Just an illusion suggested by the multiple planes of the palimpsests that are Donner’s paintings.
The plane, that paradoxical plane in which Donner’s work is realized, is not speculation, though. It is in front of us and it invites us to imagine, to enjoy, to dream.
Traces and strokes, Diego Donner’s paintings allow us to dream. But one can dream not just because his painting proposes the dreaming but because his art enables us to dream. Not just because they are representations, but because the invitation in his traces holds the charm of his art.
Hugo Achugar
Montevideo, agosto de 1999
Persistencies, mythical sceneries and persistencies, again.
Thus, nowadays there are those who consider painting an art of the past, a mere handicraft, and they don’t ever want to see another painting again because they think it’s something outdated. I think that there are prejudices worse than the academic ones: the prejudices of the avant-garde. These are totally counterproductive, because they close what should be an opening and they become the exact opposite of the meaning of the avant-garde. With the additional aggravation, now, of seeking to impose the rules of the new, while saying at the same time that the avant-garde movement is a thing of the past. What was justified in the avant-garde because of its intrinsic spirit – revolutionary dogmatism – persists today for no other reason than mere absolutism.
Luis Felipe Noé
The rules of the new, understood as an obsessive search and not as a value different from the known, nor as an inaugural and profound change, stubbornly decree the death of painting. Somehow, as any plastic action follows from the pictorial scene, by way of a dangerous syllogism, the total death of the artistic image is foretold. These are times of a totalitarian pluralism, which does not multiply and fertilize diversities but, oddly enough, excludes them. The rules of the game supported by some sort of free for all, consecrate a sectarian supremacy of the absolute, without mediations, without degrees. In this context, apparently quite widespread: does it make sense for the pictorial to persist?
Before giving an answer it would be convenient, and prudent, to practice a short memory exercise, and at the same time, focus these matters from a perspective of restraint. In the off-chance that painting were dying, it would be appropriate, for example, to look for a possible starting date for its agony. In the first century of our era, Plinius the Old called painting ars moriens, the dying art. First immediate observation: this agony seems oddly long, it has been going on for almost two thousand years. In the XVII century, somebody by the name of Bellori dictates that since Rafael there haven’t been any more painters. In the XIX century Hegel, in his Aesthetic Lessons states that the good times of painting are over. By that time, Goya, Ingres, Gainsborough and Delacroix , among others, were painting. In the second half of that same century, Baudelaire accuses Monet of having killed painting. In the third decade of the XX century, Siqueiros announces the death of easel painting while he persists in practicing easel painting. In the sixties, the decree is made by Pierre Restany and, in this region, Jorge Romero Brest swiftly joins the prediction. To date, there have been countless obituaries. It is obvious that if painting is dying, the terminal process appears paradoxically healthy, extremely extended and lacks a certain date of decease.
Actually, down here, in these and other southern lands, we should reflect about how that death relates to us, if we deserve to be its mourners and appear in the obituary notice. Because maybe on a certain date, whose relative location can be traced back to the sixties, what died was the subject of European modernity, the hegelian subject, logical and civilized to oblivion. It was difficult to ensure the survival of a such a modelic individual after Auschwitz. And with the death of that modern subject, the modernist avant-garde project was aborted. How much does that death belong to us or to what degree is it the resignated acceptance of a shock wave? Why should we, a continent which has barely reached its post-adolescence, with a capacity for a future in spite of everything, mourn a death which is enormously foreign? If European, and to a lesser extent, North American painting, haven’t been able to generate great names because they are engrossed in the melancholy of a continuous comeback, why should we, the exiles of Europe according to Borges, deprive ourselves of a reflection on the pictorial, asking ourselves if that narration has actually said everything it had to say? Diego Donner’s pictorial narration, in the diversity of its discourse, seems to have something to say, seems to show a different sense of the new, seems to configure, even in its insistence, a live discourse. It is better to start with the obvious traits. Donner’s painting is closer to pictography, to runic expressions, than to any western pictorial tradition. In the first place, even though it is produced on one of its now conventional supports, although not the highly prestigious canvass, it is not produced in a conventional manner. What defines the essentiality of its image, from its formal identity to its composition, through the gestation of its atmosphere, is not the drawing of the brush, the impasting achieved with the brush or the spatula, or the rhythmic play of gestures and patches on an elastic surface. The foundational support is a sizeable plaster coat. It is then painted, dented with engraver’s, even jeweler’s, crafts, washed, painted again and at times, dented and painted once more. In a strict sense there is painting, but interacting with other technical disciplines, soft or hard incisions, that is, carving, bas-relief or primarily sculptoric reminiscence. Therefore, by creative assumptions, by process and even by results, it is much closer to the non-western aesthetic-symbolic productions of original Andean, Central American, African, Asian cultures, of Australian aboriginal art, of Scandinavian art, of Celtic art. Ultimately, everything which is removed from the Renaissance tradition. However, by a prodigious circumstance, fusion or amazing mixture, the softest fragrance of that tradition prospers in each of his works.
Donner’s so strangely pictorial painting, from these basic aspects of configuration, is already expressing a rigorous will to persist. In painting, in all art in these latitudes, announcing improbable deaths is not the point. It is a question of digesting everything available, of not hesitating in the exploration of paths that lead to appropiation, carefully lighting images with distant references and a vigorous aura of singularity. It is about a renewed and renewing persistency. Once that has been achieved, then double the questionings. That aura, the aura of any image: is it determined by disciplinary modalities or by its affective load? Are the expressive means the ones that give foundation to the substantiality of discourse or is that expressive density unrelated to physical vehicles? An insane rhetorical sin would be perpetrated if a visual narration could only be legitimated by the way it is enunciated, regardless of the depth and sincerity of its enunciation. Because within and without the pictorial scene, there are impeccably formulated narrations that say absolutely nothing. The narration Donner has been putting together, by its formal quality, by its mythical resonance, by its depth and expressive character, by all it says and whispers, by what it hides, is totally distant from an empty discourse.
Through the prism of myth, one can delineate the diverse silhouettes of the social, always blurry, different registers of thought which are hardly ever binary, various versions of the cosmos, but the figure of the enigma will never be revealed: what myth does is, precisely, to renew the unknown to express in its own way that, impregnated by language, reality is something complex and multiple, which has invisible undertones and entrances, which is inhabited by energies that exceed it and load it with thicknesses, echoes and shadows.
Ticio Escobar
Once you have analyzed the more or less obvious hints, you should go into less capturable essences. In the first place, I should admit my personal loyalty to almost all the images Diego Donner has minted. The conditioning use of the quantitative adverb is not an attempt at attenuating that loyalty. The “almost” is required toward any creator, nobody is capable of establishing permanent strategies of seduction and bedazzlement at all times. Any creator who is honest, authentic, knows that their results do not always measure up to their talent. At times, whole periods belie it. At other times, the occasional flaws, the desertions and fleeting inconsistencies confirm the rigor, the effort of a creative process. Pablo Picasso maintained that any piece is inevitably the result of a sum of destructions, disappointments and failures.
Talking about the essences requires analyzing them using the risky limitations imposed by words. In general, and particularly in Donner’s case, it is difficult to attempt to explain those essences. Because ultimately, the rite of sensible communion with any work of art is almost always inexplicable. Words can merely brush lightly on those essences; winning over the discomforts of the explicative approach, trying not to betray the spell created by an image. If all this comes up when interfering with the vulnerable within of a work of art, if there is the feeling of breaking up prodigies, with Donner this can become an initial blocking, recurring, even distressing. Because his rough prodigies are beautifully standoffish, reticent, and they prefer to hide in the security of silence. Even when they insinuate tears and anxieties, they do it from the unpronounced cry. Finally, and maybe as an excusing justification, one ends up accepting that authentic magic, totally unrelated to tricks and prestidigitation, knows how to preserve itself, how to confuse from its complex labyrinths and to armor its indecipherable signs. So the contemplator-reader has to accept that only possible interpretative accesses will be sketched, but never any kind of code, of miraculous key. I will be very careful not to violate, by rationalizing, the pure and archaic beauty of those mythical sceneries. Because that’s what it is all about, ambivalent mythical sceneries, where the sacred and the profane blur borders.
The neoclassical academicism which somehow prolongs Latin American modernity, imposes the empire of the logos, the hegelian thinking. The paradigm of civilization consecrates it and eliminates the possibility of restoring mythical thinking. Thus, in the layers of reality, what is conventionally accepted as reality, the sweet and flowing percolation of myth is made impossible. It is expelled, or at least that is the intention, from the absolutist paradise of logic. Mythical thinking is a reminder of the colonial domination, or even before, a past that illustrated thought rejects as primitive, barbarian, and consequently, inferior. It is only with the modernist Latin American avant-garde, from the utopian boastings of the Arte Concreto-Invención or the Madi, to Antropofagía in Brazil; from Ultraism and Borges to the theory of the Real Maravilloso and Carpentier; going through Figari’s Regionalism or the search of spells in the light of the Caribbean pursued by Armando Reverón, that the recovery of mythical thinking takes place in a brilliant way. As Octavio Paz once said, myth is saved again in art. Against the totalitarianism of logos, once more, the uncertainty of mythos is recovered. That’s why, inevitably, these mythical mise-en-scenes are only capable of encouraging mysteries, of convincing one of the improcedence of trying to understand everything, explain everything. It’s about that moving receptive attitude that accepts sheltering the secret and nurturing mystery.
In Donner, in many others, again, mythical thinking illuminates. In my judgement, it isn’t too important to determine if that mythical thinking is connected with definite religious doctrines. Maybe in Donner the Hindi pantheon, or especially Buddhist doctrine have considerable incidence. But in his incisions, in the atmosphere set up by colors, matter and textures, also breathes the stripped spirituality of the Andean cultures, the abstractly symbolic graphism of those cultures. Actually, it is not terribly important whether the composing cannons have a mandalic reminiscence or if they are extrapolations of Nazcan tracings, if they aim for identification with the Mahayana decorative designs or with the strokes left on the ground by Tarahumara dancers, if they are tributaries of Ramayana or of Chilam Balam. As any authentic creative act, the sources that nurture it can be manyfold, but the resulting image is singular, absolutely its own. The many myths converge, merge, interweave, dilute one another, in a unique mise-en-scene of untransferable identity. And the restauration of mythical thinking, of a mythical sensibility, takes place in an equally unique domain, of a visual poetry that transcends from an image full of earthly carnality, modestly bleeding and austerely vital.
Art does not reflect, it acts. Thanks to this, our present appears more fertile than the conscience of the existence of a range of possibilities where expression finds the right space and where a critical project is possible. Art is essentially political when it accepts crisis as a necessary risk to assume due responsibility to reinvent the possible and enrich present itself. Art has something to say when it shows with urgency the motives of the being, when it proves the unobviousness of today, the autonomy of thought and a course parallel to (not a well solved simulation of) the ethical values that accompany contemporary society. Art has something to say, just by confirming it is that sane place in whose interior the possible can continue to be experienced as a form of knowledge.
Gianni Romano
Once we’ve analyzed the essential issues related with the metaphoric reach of his images, it becomes necessary to analyze other equally essential matters: those that refer to the means used to transmit those values, the formal foundation that saturates them, the visual vehicles called upon to transmit them to the observer. At an epidermic level, it might seem that Diego Donner’s imagery does not accept the starting hypothesis of crisis as a necessary risk, that a certain habituation would be keeping him in certain formal reincidences, making it dispense with the enrichment of its immediate time, of its constant present. Are those obvious traits a consequence of excessive reliance in the repertory of shapes and signs or are they indications of premeditated persistence? The answer seems clear, evident, obvious. Donner’s painting is now, more than ever, decidedly acting, involved with a certain risk and time. And it is above all else, passionately persistent. Now, isn’t it excessively performative, given his prolific production? Before attempting to provide another answer, one needs to call attention to one inherent trait in Donner’s painting. His images deceive, they seem to even challenge the sensible intelligence of the observers, unaware, imprecise, careless. They impose a kind of loyalty I’ve acknowledged before. They are captivating images, in a way possessive, demanding. They do not accept lightheartedness and triviality. From the moment they emerge from persistence, they demand a similar contemplative persistence.
Unnoticeably, sometimes with almost imperceptible twists, Donner makes the embedded crisis in his images grow, he transforms it, true to himself and avoiding the trappings of calligraphic repetitions. To be sure, if what is required were an artistic exercise with multiple personalities, in perpetual and inconstant change, regardless of how insubstantial and epidermic this may be, Donner does not act in that facile risk management. Changing to avoid sedimenting costs little, actually, almost nothing. The real risk is to investigate to allow for transformations to decant, granting persistency. Of course, as Eduardo Galeano used to say, we live in a use-and-discard society. Those who blindly adore that ultrafast ritual of disposal, those who generally prefer the changing interplay of surfaces to in-depth perseverance, will surely prophesize that this is a repetitive language. Those who endeavor to sail beyond appearance, as is always required in artistic contemplation, will be able to discover that persistence keeps its vigor because it knows, subtly, to renovate its density, even by modifying its artiluges.
It all seems the same, although everything is warmly, sensibly different. And that ability redeems a stubborn formalism of fatigues and routines, which grants honesty to skin, flesh and bones.
The great and rough territories that act simultaneously are still there, as a background and as areas of chromatic personality. But now they seem to look for a fusion of shades which is almost foggy, blurry, almost undefined. The incisions are still there, establishing archaic wefts and warps in the lines. But now they are not concerned with a melodiousness capable of weaving the whole composition. They choose to unfold a greater freedom and to pluralize options. At times, weaving an almost crowded, baroque lace; others, like drifting islands, nomadic traces that seem unwilling to settle down, almost ready to remake themselves in another corner the image, in another foggy or clear plain. The pictorial strokes are still there. But now they seem to achieve a more incisive vigor, describing swift and continuous gesturing curves or angles, alternating with the drippings or with the impasted shade. The refined color combinations are still there, but now everything seems to be more decidedly somber or light, more brownish, more earthly or more roughly white. All the morphemes are there, all the basic syntax of his pictorial language, but the semantics try to establish renewed itineraries within a persistent, passionate and ever unsatisfied journey.
Now, as ever, Diego Donner’s painting confirms that art is capable of saying something when it establishes a clean, healthy space, where the vicissitude of the possible and the uncertain, of the poetically mythical, are the only securities for a knowledge stripped of dogmas, simplifications and vain rhetoric.
Alfredo Torres
Montevideo, 2000
The three quotes opening each of the fragments correspond, respectively, to the following texts: Luis Felpe Noé, Horacio Zabala: “El arte en cuestión”, Adriana Hidalgo Editora, Buenos Aires, 2000. Ticio Escobar: “Textos varios”, Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, Asunción, 1992; Gianni Romano: “¿Quién tiene miedo de lo contemporáneo?”, Lápiz N° 115, Madrid, 1995.
Confluencia: The Paintings of Diego Donner
THE WORLD BANK ART PROGRAM
is pleased to present the paintings of Diego Donner (b. 1959, Montevideo, Uruguay). They are immediately appealing at a purely aesthetic level — the textured canvases are worked and re-worked to create relief-like surfaces. Yet, they are not sculptural. Rather, these paintings completely confirm the flatness of the canvases as two-dimensional objects. Donner’s work reflects globalization in the best sense as a crucible for creative effort, the vast opportunity presented by mutual cultural exchange, and what can be learned from the examination of the diversity of human expression.
The visual beauty of Donner’s work belies a highly complex integration of numerous influences and an effort to form a metaphysical reality and order. Visually, Donner’s paintings evoke the art brut period of Jean Dubuffet with roughly hewn symbols and images that seek absolute truths. These images also call to mind the geometry of pictograms found throughout the Americas associated with ancient indigenous peoples.
To fully understand Donner’s work, it is helpful to understand Universal Constructivism and the work of Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres-García (1874-1949). Born in Uruguay, Torres-García spent much of his life abroad — in Barcelona, Madrid, Paris and New York. He digested the avant-garde artistic trends of the Cubist experiments of artists like Pablo Picasso and George Braque and the philosophies of artists like Piet Mondrian. These included the idea of being “true” to materials – that is, that the flat plain of a canvas was simply a flat plane rather than a mode for expressing three dimensions. Torres-García returned to Montevideo with the idea of integrating these concepts with indigenous expressions to find a universal set of symbols and truths.
This effort synthesized uniquely local, ancient ideas and aesthetics (such as pre-Columbian art) with artistic and intellectual movements outside Uruguay. The goal was to find essential human commonalities in the diversity of human expression. Diverse influences were integrated into reductive, universal symbols. This was a willful attempt at social, intellectual, and aesthetic construction (hence the name “Constructivism”). It differed from the perhaps more familiar Russian Constructivism which, while also highly influenced by the work of the Cubists, focused more on universal truths of scientific rationality rather than human commonalities.
Donner’s work is formed by a wide range of personal and artistic sources in addition to the seminal impact of Torres-García and “does not adhere strictly to that school of thought.” As a boy, he visited the studio of Jose Gurvich (1927-1974) who was a close friend of his parents. Born in Lithuania, Gurvich settled with his family in Montevideo in 1933 and became one of the most important exponents of the Uruguayan Constructivist school of art. “They were close friends, Gurvich and my parents, and you can imagine how this influenced me. In my boyhood home, there were many pieces of the Constructivist style, as well as many African pieces of art.” Donner explains that, “I am not only influenced by the Constructivists, but also those ideas and inspirations that inspired the Constructivists themselves like the so-called “Primitive Symbolic Art” from different cultures and times throughout the world.”
As an artist of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, Donner does not struggle with notions of “Latin American identity” and modernity in the same intense and conscious way as his Uruguayan predecessors of the 1920s and ‘30s. Donner’s work reflects a distinctly Latin American and particularly Uruguayan expression by combining a wide range of influences – a “confluencia” of ideas and symbols, universal in its sensual, human approach to painting.
We wish to thank His Excellency Ambassador Hugo Fernández Faingold, Ambassador of Uruguay to the United States, the Uruguay Cultural Foundation for the Arts in Washington, D.C. and its director, Florencia.
WORLD BANK SHOW, WASHINGTON D.C. YEAR 2002