Daniel Callori
Obra reciente
August 16 to September 14, 2017
Curatorial text
The arrival at Daniel Callori’s workshop is not something that happens suddenly. It’s not just about going through one or two doors. You have to get to the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Montserrat and halfway down the block on Moreno Street between Salta and Lima is the indicated number. As soon as you have closed the door behind you, you must begin to climb a high staircase, there are many steps. Once at the top, and after several steps through a corridor, to the left and facing the street, the door opens where the artist waits. A brief step through the kitchen and then there is the workshop room. There are easels that hold some finished canvases, others in progress, and the curiosity to see what the artist’s latest works are like in full production. A constant: varied colors and always with an eloquent presence. But, one cannot escape the characteristics of space. You haven’t taken many steps and you are already in the center of the room. The height of the ceiling leads one to look upwards, towards the decided verticality of the space, which suggests that the construction is many years old in line with the vertical meters. Daniel risks that Juan Manuel de Rosas had something to do with the area. Therefore, it would be almost two hundred years.
The floors are made of pitch pine, the French doors wide open, although it is already winter, they open onto a balcony with small plants. And, the look is immediately taken away. There emerges the absolutely striking image of the dome of the church of the Virgin of Montserrat that is one block away, framed by the opening of the doors. Nothing blocks the view between the old workshop on the first floor and the vault which is at a distance of at least sixty meters. It is inevitable to be swept away by the perspective. To this, we add a particular fact about something that happens with that dome, and that is that it cannot be seen from the other side, from the front of the building that faces Belgrano Avenue, where the doors of the church and the entrance are. . And, this historic building gives its name to the neighborhood. The vault or dome, in general, is a universal shape that attracts everyone, and the fact that the symbology of traditions affirms that this shape is identified with the sky seems like something that could not be otherwise.
Daniel Callori is identified with the neighborhood and in different workshops in the area, although not uniquely, he has developed his work over many years. At least ten have passed since we first came into contact with his work, and it is inevitable to think about the perspective of that time and its development in recent years, which is followed by his recent production.
However, this brief introductory story that brings us closer to the artist’s workplace does not have as its objective any anecdotal question, but rather to seek a symbolic look at the artist’s recent work and refers, in particular, to the selection of works for his exhibition of the new production at Otto, art gallery. The set brings together four groups of fabrics of medium and small sizes. Some are diptychs, in which the conjunction of colors is daring, due to their variety and even dissonance. Another group brings together those in which the combination of red and black is the protagonist, another is in an intermediate place, and then, the papers, which observe similar procedures on a scale.
Callori has traveled the path of abstraction in painting in a very personal way. And, here a question arises, which is whether the artist follows a line of that tendency by deliberate decision or because he arrived at it through an experimental game, not exempt from an extra-artistic origin, put into practice many years ago. For those who don’t know him, his paintings don’t start on the canvas, but before. The artist is faithful to this method that his technology borrowed from the scientific laboratory. It involves pouring drops of paint of different colors, expressly chosen by him, and placing them between two glass slides.
With this experiment the artist goes in search of the image and the chromatic mixture that he himself, in collaboration with chance, arranged. He then transfers that image, which is the germ of the final work, amplifying its proportions to the canvas, and from there his work continues.
The story of the method finds a common thread also intertwined with the meaning of the work. The laboratory resource refers to the rationality of science and the encounter with the result predicts a great deal of chance.
In parallel, the choice of colors has great importance in your creative process. The artist stands in front of the color wheel with absolute freedom of choice. Any combination is possible, from stridency to harmony. However, his broad conceptual opening also includes the varied combinations between reds and reds, and reds and blacks, of great prominence in this exhibition.
And, in this set of works, the emergence of Orphism in Europe in 1912 seems to resonate, Apollinaire’s idea of grouping some artists under this name. It was a way of making art that did not need to have a theme but rather relied on form and color to communicate meaning and emotion, just as Orfeo had achieved with the pure forms of music. The parallelism refers more to the method than to the results. In search of kinship with the work of our artist, abstract expressionism can also be suggested, especially North American. Somewhere between the intention of gestural painting and historical color field painting, these works find their genealogy. It is not forgotten that Mark Rothko had a surrealist and biomorphic phase before 1947.
In his procedure, Callori still recognizes that first chance operation as the starting point for the canvases in this exhibition. However, only as a start, since most of them have been heavily intervened after the fact. This is an action carried out in stages. They are superpositions of paint on paint, new forms, some resemble shadows that have been released from their original body, gestures in the manner of sweeps in transparency (brush), sum of other colors, intensities, that the artist graduates in the future of the process itself, in permanent recreation. Finally, an archetype seems to be discerned as a plot in several of the pieces. And, by saying plot, we suggest the relationship with textiles. Some works resemble oriental textiles and other origins.
Scientific method, chance, time, rhythm, silence, color dissonances or consonances and confluences. However, something else is glimpsed. These are states of consciousness rather than allusions to the external world. Daniel Callori’s work has a dynamic virtue, which is related, in a positive sense, to the subjectivity of the present era. In English the word is consciousness, which could refer to granting a materiality, perhaps, organic to consciousness, personal and collective. Fate and chance arranged for Daniel Callori to be an artist and painter, therefore, that consciousness materializes in his painting. And, through it he communicates it.
Coda. That being conscious of consciousness through art, in the first instance, is an individual experience. However, this transit through art, which is both temporal and of all time, returns to collective consciousness on a large scale. Here, the reference to the appearance of the dome in the center of the view of the artist’s workshop can be taken up. The vault, which is also an artistic form with an anthropological meaning, is one of the most universal cultural and traditional forms of all time. And, this underlies Callori’s work.
Mercedes Casanegra
August, 2017
