Exhibitions

Portrait: From the Apparent to the True

Through a complex investigation undertaken by the artist within the realm of painting, this reflection on the portrait emerges as a collection of shapeless pigments that simultaneously conceal the essence of the portrayed individuals.

Diego Díaz is a draftsman and painter who has expanded these mediums into open spaces to explore the materiality of plastic expression. Through a series of studies on texture, color, and the incidence of light in his paintings, he has managed to dissolve representation into a liminal phenomenon where representational appearance succumbs to the outermost point of corporeality, the skin.

Portrait: From the Apparent to the True is an exhibition that brings together pictorial, drawing, and spatial explorations with the intention of speaking about the other without imposing its presence. This accumulation of plastic elements alludes to beings from whom only the limit remains, the edge that determines the space of the body in front of the territory of the gaze. All gestures of that space that covers us and, if it could be extended in these forms, would delineate us.

Thus, it exposes, to the surface, the fragile shell that envelops the humanity of the beings it represents. Like a Möbius strip, it blurs the inside and the outside of a thin fabric that now hangs to also reveal the fragility that, disjointed, is exposed absent of the conventionalisms that society has been imposing on the image, on bodies, and on faces that, restless, seek to establish the much-desired identity.

Curated by: Santiago Vélez

The shapes of the nights, 2022

Sometimes bustling, sometimes silent. Sometimes street, sometimes bar. Sometimes image, sometimes emptiness. These could be the premises of the research that Diego Díaz has been conducting for years in the search for the forms of the night. However, there is more. In his shadowy approaches, there is an immeasurable desire to find the hidden beauty behind the blind cloak of the taciturn darkness of withering days.

The drawings, paintings, and installations presented by Díaz in his works are the culmination of a trail of time, events, joy, and a lot of solitude. Within these works, there is a accumulation of situations, places, and encounters that dissolve as easily as the nights themselves: here, there is a suspended time that does not freeze in the moment, but rather vanishes in the spaces it represents.

The drawings, on the other hand, take us deep into the place, into those unsettling moments lived that are not etched into memory but, on the contrary, into the mundane vestige of what happened. The need to observe what is depicted there is also a visual meandering that oscillates between the fleeting image of shapes and colors against a blackness that, in addition to being night, is also a seductive darkness.

The blinds, on the other hand, in a plastic and slender unfolding, are the anatomy of traversing closed streets, empty of events, which here, in contrast to reality, leave behind an amorphous and decomposed anatomy of the rigidity and sequence of the establishments they refer to. They are the symbiotic fusion between representation and abstraction of elements devoid of identity to which the artist imbues plasticity and visceral spatiality in some cases, and spectral in others.

Santiago Vélez Salamanca
Curator

Tenuous, 2019

The mission of hiding and revealing is also given in the case of the red papers, but this color is identified with the ideas of danger, passion and desire constituting the appropriate scenario for suggestive scenes of eroticism or violence. His young characters are represented with the security and perception of the old teachers, but their contemporary appearance as well as the bohemian atmosphere of where they arise with admirable precision, linking them clearly with the here and now. A time in which the bohemian no longer represents an anti-bourgeois attitude but a pastime splashed with drugs and alcohol, accepted and habitual experience in urban events.

Eduardo Serrano
Curator