Carlos David

The Father, The Son and the Other one

In the autobiographical notes accompanying the catalog of La vida espléndida de Neli María del Mar (The Splendid Life of Neli María del Mar), his most recent exhibition in Caracas, Carlos David (Venezuela, 1961) tells of his life between Caracas and Europe, especially London, where he has spent most of his life. With humor, irony, and sarcasm, he describes situations and personal experiences resulting from culture shock—which is visually symbolized in many of his paintings. The origin of the show’s beautiful title is well known, very “Garcia Marquez-ian”, and it establishes an enigma. Neli María del Mar is a female presence, but in David’s work we find only male characters. These are not contradictions but pretexts to symbolize the longing inherent to Being.
Carlos David is a figurative painter who does not tell a story. As he points out, “I don’t interpret dreams, since, as Buddhists say, in the end nothing matters, because everything is the same.” His characters agonize between pain and secrecy, reconsidering their own status as human beings. Baring them naked is a divertimento; that act takes from them everything that is accessory and traps them in their own skins and their own suffering as a theme—in this case, of painting itself.
David presents series of figurative paintings difficult to label as manifestations of any given school. We could talk of an expressionistic charge in his brushstroke, in his color stains, in his violent imagery and the irony underscoring his topics. His expressionism, however, keeps a distance from histrionic academicism, and comes to us as an intense, convincing meditation on life and art, resulting from the artist’s personal attitudes. Presented visually through a “savage imagery,” David’s themes cannot be dissociated from the circumstances of their origin. For him, to be a figurative painter has been to find his true self, and to decipher the enigmas of the brush, to exorcise the culture of the motorcycle influencing him from the 1960s, and to precociously understand that to be an artist is a serious thing in a society in flux.
One of the show’s centerpieces, El padre, el hijo y el otro (The Father, the Son, and the Other), establishes a comparative thread between what the artist has done in the past and his current work, without altering his rigorous coherence. The piece’s three, apparently identical, characters, seem to return provocatively in each painting.They challenge the viewer with their almost cynical nakedness, talking about a non-theme. More than a motif or a story without anecdote, David’s paintings pose existential problems. In this case, we could speak of a conceptual and existential art. It is not coincidental that, faced with the sensorial hallucination of moving constantly between the First and the Third worlds, the artist says he tries to express himself by “painting contradictory solutions, and to understand them better I represent the act’s very banality. But I haven’t been able yet to express the whole; some of the symbolism and of the details always remain locked in the brush.”
Couldn’t we speak here of a romantic emphasis still current among certain artists? Nothing there would contradict the precarious situation of Being within the universe. Anxiety can also be a theme, just like the world’s sensual delights, or the critique of the manipulations of power. For David, the big themes are located in the erratic meaning of consciousness, in the saturation of existential conflicts, and in the search for unknown truths —that is, in the inherent problems of contemporary human beings. All of these conflicts are worked through a palette of saturated, sour colors filling large “conflict” spaces. These spaces, resolved in the opposition of fullness and emptiness and in the compositional structure of horizontal bands, refer back to a landscape: in this case, man’s internal landscape. Carlos David appropriates painting in order to question and interrogate the world, transferring to the viewer the possibility of self-interrogation. This is not an easy situation. David’s painting accomplishes the goal.

Bélgica Rodríguez