JD-Doria

Art in Ek-Stasis of J.D.Doria
By  Pamela Cento

J.D.Doria, when speaking about painting, is an emerging artist, and this clarification is necessary to allow us to try and go deeper into the art of this artist, who has conducted various experiences in the past in the field of experimental theatre and cinema. The creative process in a collective environment, be it a crew or a group of actors, brought him to feel an ever more pressing need, for a form visual art that would not be re-legated to the participation of a multitude of people. It was not a need for solitude, but a need to make the art experience a wholly individual and singular event, so as to allow the motion, that of the soul and the senses, to emerge from a dimension of ek-stasis, beyond the self. This is the crucial nexus of all his art expressed in his paint works.

From his previous experiences in the field of visual art, he gathered influences that have served him well, allowing him to assimilate a natural, and non rational, inclination towards the formal aspect of the work, and to create paintings that reveal great equilibrium in their composition, even where what
appears to the eye is just “simple” lines. J.D. Doria subtracts the superfluous from these lines, withholding nothing but the sole essence, which is not conceptual, but emotional. His painting is founded on a formal order, which however is never established a-priori: everything in the spatial dimension appears to be meticulously controlled by the line; clean, with no frills. The actual guideline of the composition is a well-marked line, even when its dripping color is lain on the canvas.

The sign is always recognizable, even in those cases in which the artist’s hand makes it curve, allowing it to self-generate in a hypnotic and aggressive motion (Spare parts for Enlightenment); more often the lines are straight and well set, side by side  (Lines of Destiny – Trick, Lines of Destiny – Fragile, ad again Lines of Destiny – Tears). What seems to dominate is the extreme rigour; the lines created with the acrylics, enamels or plastic material, generate a distance between the observer and the work, but soon after, the observer finds himself demanding a direct contact with the painting so as to attack it, or even to just slightly tarnish all that destabilizing precision.

The paintings of J.D.Doria come to birth and search for freedom, freedom from thought and from reason, and the search achieves its objective by only apparently communicating the contrary. The little soldiers standing in an orderly fashion, one next to the other, within their ranks, feel each other through their not touching one another, and the saying “to break the ranks” becomes equivalent, and not by chance, even if perhaps only momentarily, to the breaking up of an order. To break the ranks in the case of the observer of the works of J.D.Doria, is equivalent to breaking up the obsessive order of the composition: it’s the desire to stretch one’s hand out towards the painting and bend its lines. In the moment just before painting, the artist observes the white canvas, and senses its needs, setting his own needs aside.

He achieves this through a process of negation that leads to a mind emptied of self. This is why J.D.Doria is a primitive artist: in the instant preceding the creation of the work of art, he forgets all, how one thinks, how one talks, how one reasons, and only once all this has been achieved, he starts feeling the material…, after which comes the turn of the color… It is a kind of primitiveness that produces the repetition of the linear signs, carried out by an “obsessive” gesture, deriving (paradoxically?) from an emptying of the mind, from a distracted awareness, in the sense of an awareness that has lowered its state of alertness and has lost much of the rational element, allowing the gesture of painting to come to life, to become alive – a gesture this, that is not interested in knowing about how it is born or where it is destined to arrive.

The unfolding of the process generates signs that tend to multiply to infinity, created as they are by a gesture that is “emptied”, similarly to the kind of automatic writing that the Surrealists were looking for mainly in dreams.

The art of J.D.Doria does not belong to the realm of dreams, and neither to that of nightmares. His getting undressed is like returning to a dimension that does not belong even to reality, but is generated by the detachment of his being from the self, and of his being from the rest of the world. The mind, void of logic, travels through  an extremely cathartic rhythm; the “enlivened” tool of painting journeys to places of no where and no time, in a situation of ek-stasis, in a continuum that is integrated in its parts and in its flow: signs are born without caring to communicate thoughts or words, but to leave traces of their becoming.

Forged essence

When comparing the titles of the works exhibited to the abstract spaces of colour and matter exposed by the canvases, a contrast is revealed. The titles, displayed in several languages, come as a mixture of insults, ‘Benzoná (son of a bitch)’, news paper headlines, ‘Bloody Day’, current news events, ‘The Fence 2004’, and existential statements, ‘Beauty is Faster than Perception’, ‘Quarter me’ or ‘Future Perfect’. The existential names recall the universal spiritual current that identifies itself, in the field of Art, as abstract expressionism. These titles are accompanied by others that may seem to corrupt the existential lines of thought apparently expressed by spiritual abstractism.

The conflicting combination of abstract existential values with titles taken from current news events is even more marked, in the canvases, by a web of actions and directions taking form in the spaces of colour and materials used. Running between the abstract spiritual concepts and the worldly dimension of reality, a path that borders universality, while dealing with the specific, gradually comes to life; a path allowing the possibility to aspire to a universal spiritual perspective while nevertheless remaining related to a practical knowledge of everyday life. It has to do with a forged essence condensed in a painting, but carried out with plastic materials and manual applications, by smoothing out, merging, gluing, mixing and combining.

This abstract pictorial work sets itself in the wake of the spiritual pictorial experiences of colour spaces of the canvases of Mark Rothko, recalling with ironical gaze the pictorial expressions and coloured spaces of the neo Dada works of Robert Rauschenberg and of Jasper Johns, and after the cultural dictionary of multiple possibilities given by Gerhard Richter.

It has to do with a disillusioned pictorial action that has not lost the sense of faith and is conscious of the countersense deriving from it. It has to do with a process where art plays the pratical role of means of expression, just because it cannot describe anything. The pictorial activity therefore turns into an inspirational source for scientific activity, a sort of alchemical experiment bringing together completely contrasting materials, expressing the process of the evolution of knowledge.

The combination of materials sees the blending of salt, metal, plastic, alluminium foil, gold leafs and spray, wax, cloth, wood, paper, etc. The movement of the materials used and their combination leaves an expressive abstract imprint on the painting, a spatial sketch of colour zones. This suggests a sensation of detachment from the practical possibility of  ‘forged essence’.

An ambiguity hinted by the possibility itself of bridging the contact with the materials towards the spiritual essences that lie traced on the works. Like a sort of doubt in dealing with illusion that nevertheless brings to sustain its existence, revealing its weakness on one hand and simultaneously using its force.

Ami Steiniz
Curator