Exhibitions

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 A time in which the bohemian no longer represents an anti-bourgeois attitude but a pastime splashed with drugs and alcohol, accepted and habitual experience in urban events.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