some of my  narratives

My artworks are exercises in what I call desperate romanticism: an existential visual experience that is incongruently connected to current realities and residual potentials for aware escapism in the world of today. A world that is on the verge of ecological catastrophe, and with unprecedented capacities for self-destruction, concomitant with a deep non-teleological hedonistic disregard for the future. A world with an ending not hard to imagine, but with a generous magmatic creative energy that always opens room for hope and reverie! Anxious hope, however! A world providing no substantive reasons for genuine optimism but also not eliminating its potential persistence as residual energy. An ambivalent world, simultaneously combining the apex of heritage and human creativity and the inherent destructive potential in unlimited human ambitions and lack of perspective.

The desperate romanticism is a result of our contemporary experience, when stylistic unity in time does not make sense any more due to a permanent perception of the tangibility of the end. The push to radical immediate expressions of passion for existence can momentarily reflect the traces of authentic joy of being. Desperate romanticism is therefore expressing the viewpoint that all there is can easily be soon gone into oblivion – artistic expressions included. That’s why the romantic focus can only express the joy of hic et nunc, of a creative need anchored in immediacy and finitude that makes the artworks subjective, reflective, and ended at an intermediate point of elaboration since completing them would not make any projective sense. The perennial process of painting and facing the colors and matter is isolated in itself as an unteleological practice tangential to absurdity.

My work is therefore an instinctive, non-chronological or biographical manner of painting that pushes provisory color contaminations and an immediate reaction to the resistance of the oil colors as medium. Desperate romanticism is not a social expression but a form of radical isolation, self-reflection and disenchantment. A type of agoraphobic perception of ontological loneliness and finitude, and a form of recuperating fragments of momentary optimism in the large pallet of possible pessimisms of expression. Colors stay therefore as temporary romantic expressions of the self, in a dissolving world, where nothing makes sense on a long run but only on short exercises of gratitude for being. The colors provide simultaneously an expression of temporary freedom, happiness and affection linked to the anxiety of finitude and lack of meaning. A perennial exercise in contamination in a world of exhausted resources, hunger for unlimited immediate self-realization and actual fragility of being. Romanticism on the verge of disaster means acknowledging the potential of colors to express an unlimited desire for life in the circumstances of visible dissolution.

These are signs of vivid yet exhausted love, the remains of emotions in tangible finitude. It is a cosmic sad story that has passion in it, even if a passion on the verge of dissolution. The process of painting is thorn between the beauty of possible refined artistic expressions and aware brutality of the days that push their own colors to the state of temporary and perennial project. Aptitude and improvisation, vision and expression of futility, desire and finitude, hope and reality melt in indistinct and unexpected shapes and combinations of a tired freshness. Desperate romanticism is a borderline touch of a self-vision not as we want it but as it unescapably is in its joy, passion, sorrow and panic, as an accidental project in limited time. It is a reflection on what a beautiful world we inherited in our inability to preserve it. Art becomes a temporary expression that needs to be faced unfinished and unrefined due to lack of time and limited resources left to the imaginary. Its romantic nature however expresses an exasperated joy of being still.

It’s not pessimism but gratitude for being – gratitude we cannot grant to pass it further but we cannot cease to hope to. It’s a latent optimism that lost its world for realization. Painting in nowadays circumstances is non-lucrative and expresses a laziness of the end. The aesthetic expression is an immediate unfiltered need and no longer an elaborated composition addressed to eternity. It’s like painting on the shores of an erupting volcano. Its pervading romantic intuition is that when we’re through with our world we’ll know how much we actually loved it. My painting involves a romantic disconnection with reality and a subrealist oniric detachment. All temporary however! In a world of infinite interpretations, desperate romanticism is just made to be misunderstood since there is no right interpretation or any that matters on the long run.

This is an expression of solitude of one who loves the world! A type of frugal existentialism for babies that switch their attention fast to the next significant object with no claims to persistence. Desperate romanticism does not indicate any psychological or clinical sense but the existential behind the etymological French désespéré – lost for hope. But it’s not synonymous of hopelessness - as some would take it – in the sense that the romantic reflex is a constitutively hopeful engagement that now lacks a world to express the legitimacy of hoping as existential practice. It’s hoping in nothingness. Desperate romanticism is a beautiful story that you don’t want to tell anymore or no longer have time! Desperate romanticism is grunge and grudge art! ‘All in all is all we are!’