Carlos David

Comentarios a comentarios.

Suelo estudiar el trabajo de artistas cuyo interés radica en los procesos internos de la visión y de la percepción. Artistas que nos muestran con sus obras las múltiples, paradójicas y a veces contradictorias relaciones existentes entre los estímulos visuales y nuestra aprehensión del mundo. Son artistas kantianos, que no afirman nada sobre aquello que ven, sino que investigan y revelan las maneras en que vemos lo que vemos.

La gran mayoría de creadores de imágenes, sin embargo, salta por encima de esta ecuación gnoseológica y toma al mundo como un hecho. Ven lo que ven y es eso lo que dibujan, pintan, esculpen y registran en imágenes cinematográficas. Dentro de este grupo, se han colocado en la vanguardia, los que podríamos llamar comentaristas del mundo, aquellos que mediante la pintura de hechos físicos, revelan las situaciones emocionales, sociales, políticas y religiosas del entorno en que viven. Sus mentes son esencialmente sincréticas, capturan corrientes diversas de información en imágenes que las revelan como un todo con un nuevo sentido.

Carlos David Díaz Lameda es uno de estos comentaristas. Con un talento muy particular por lo revulsivo, no tiene escrúpulos en sacar a luz los sustratos más contrastrantes de la acción humana y colocarlos nítidamente pintados en una imagen que atrae y repele al espectador simultáneamente. Yo diría que tiene particular talento por las contradicciones de la hipocresía y de la mentira, a las que trata a veces con un humor aparentemente cándido, como en su serie de Carteles de Candidatos, y otros con un humor francamente negro como en su serie Del Nacimiento a la Muerte.

Carlos David es uno de esos híbridos de la diáspora que tienen la ventaja de moverse en dos corrientes culturales no del todo disímiles pero llenas de disparidades muy sabrosas de explotar. Un joven inglés, por ejemplo, a menos que sea católico o un estudioso de la pintura medieval y renacentista europea, no tiene un reservorio de imágenes religiosas de Occidente en su haber al llegar a la madurez. Ha sido expuesto a menudo, en cambio, a imágenes de sentido humanitario, cuyo origen es posible pero no exclusivamente cristiano, relacionado con la vida de los seres menos afortunados, sean éstos personas del Tercer Mundo o animales domésticos en Gran Bretaña.

La imagen perturbadora de su Resurreción, en la que una cerda adulta y gorda, con el estigma en el costado, flota frente a un cielo tras barrotes. Las innumerables pinturas de Occidente que narran el regreso de Cristo entre sus discípulos, la de Caravaggio para no ir más lejos, resaltan el signo del estigma como la clave al reconocimiento. Sin estigma, no hubo Pasión y sin Pasión no hubo Cristo. La imagen de Carlos David es desacralizadora porque conecta dos corrientes de información que no deberían cruzarse, según la sensibilidad de muchos. ¿El sacrificio único del único hijo de Dios por la humanidad comparable al sacrificio diario de billones de cerdos, también en aras de la humanidad?

La película de Ricardo Lizaola sobre Benito Reyes, alias Tio Veneno, pone en evidencia la frescura y la ingenuidad del sentimiento católico entre grandes capas del pueblo venezolano. Escenas de la bendición de las aguas, en que millares de caraqueños se congregan con recipientes para llevar luego a sus casas un poco de agua bendita, que les mantenga el hogar libre de malas influencias y pesares (“no, señora: no sirve para alejar ratones; para eso use pesticida” contesta pacientemente un sacerdote...), resultaron tan conmovedoras como divertidas, y sobre todo, reveladoras. Compartan o no esas creencias, los venezolanos las comprenden y las conocen. Esa es la riqueza de la que saca a manos llenas Carlos David para darle contenido a sus cuadros. Si bien se inclina con extraordinaria frecuencia por la imagen silenciosa, destemplada y sin tiempo, por la acción absurda (cuatro gordos mordiendo un palo; una silla cabalgando una piraña volteada, hombres de lenguas retráctiles), a veces logra imágenes efectivas con meros objetos yuxtapuestos que se animan entre sí.

Otras corrientes y tendencias subyacen en la pintura de Carlos David Díaz Lameda que aún deben salir a flote. En mi opinión, Venezuela es en este momento, la fuente de inspiración que más le conviene.

Gloria Carnevali

La vida del pintor Carlos David oscila entre Londres y Caracas. Muy joven se fue a Inglaterra, y allá se asomó al mundo del arte. No se separó más ni del arte ni de Londres, y nadie que haya vivido o simplemente explorado la ciudad como residente o transeúnte podría quitarle la razón: Londres es un lugar excepcional para pintar, para desafiar a la imaginación, y, asimismo, para confrontar lo que se crea en un ambiente de enorme variedad. Eso, (entiendo) es lo que ha subyugado a Carlos David, lo que lo ata a los espejos fantasmales del Támesis, porque de fantasmas están poblado el río y la ciudad.
Como pintor, Carlos David tiene un estilo personal, y explora con persistencia las posibilidades de un arte que no se deleita en las concesiones, que incita al espectador y lo invita al mundo del absurdo, con un sentido de humor que oscurece al propio humor negro. El joven pintor quizás piensa que el arte no es para complacer, sino para incitar; el arte como rebelión, y como striptease de la mente humana: en el cabaret, la bailarina se desnuda lentamente al son de la música, en los lienzos o en los cartones de Carlos David es la razón la que desnuda sus monstruos.
Repasemos algunos de sus cuadros: aunque tengan colores, son todos pintura negra.
En uno, la vieja camisa cuelga de ninguna parte: es la camisa de un ahorcado. En otro, tres penitentes muerden una barra (presumiblemente de hierro), para comprobar que no tienen ninguna tentación de arrepentimiento. En un tercero, una figura grotesca se repite como un castigo. Las obras de Carlos David, en síntesis, están signadas por un común denominador: la estética del arte está en la desnudez.
Si Carlos David pinta un corazón es para que sangre: el pincel es más bisturí que pincel. Todos sus colores son uno.


Simón Alberto Consalvi / 2000

Born in Caracas 1961. Carlos lived in Caracas Venezuela until the age of eleven. Subsequently moved to London, England, with his family where his father, a journalist, was posted as foreign correspondent. His mother came along too, reluctantly. While in London he studied graphic design, illustration and fine arts, mastering in European Arts in 1994. In 2002 he moved to France. David still lives and works in Paris, reluctantly.

Studies

1993-1994 MA, European Art. Winchester School of Art, Barcelona. Spain
1981-1984 BA, (Honours) Art & Design. Chelsea School of Art, London.
1978-1981 Diploma, Art & Design (Distinction) Barnet College, London.

1988-1993 Art director and, Bolívar Hall Cultural Centre, London.

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

Paintings with a bite


The Soviets are famous for their bugs – the ones planted at the US Embassy in Moscow received a bit of publicity. But the bugs that the painter Carlos David has crawling over the face of Mikhail Gorbachev aren’t high tech devices used by spies, but insects used to symbolise lies. They are ladybugs, or mariquitas in Spanish. In David’s native Venezuela, a ladybug is a derogatory term for a silly thing. The artist applied the symbolism in his oil painting of Gorbachev to highlight the leader’s ordinariness.
“Everyone sees him as this knight of Peace who has changed the world”, said David in a telephone interview from his home in London. “But all around Gorbachev everything is collapsing”. There is war and poverty. Sooner or later people will see that he’s just a man, like any other man”.
David has had a rare opportunity to see political figures for who they really are…he has grown up learning how closely art and politics are closely linked and his knowledge is quite apparent in his witty, figurative paintings. One painting depicts President Bush minus a forearm. ”I did this to show his shortsightedness”, explains the artist. “ He promised he would have a peaceful nation but soon came the Panama invasion, and now he is ready to start a war in the Gulf”.
David’s work has been referred to as “new figuration” but the motivation dates back to the first political cartoon. He uses images to encapsulate ideologies that are contradictory to each other, so at times his work touches on surrealism, as in the case of the ladybugs. He tells people that the Gorbachev painting ”untitled”, is not finished yet because Gorbachev isn’t finished yet. Such intelligence and humor is hard to come by and has helped David to succeed, even more than his excellent contacts in the art world.
He received his training in London, David attended Barnet College and Chelsea School of Art, where he discovered figurative work was his best means of self-expression, “I didn’t think that by playing with lines and colors I could get the kind of reaction I wanted”, he explains. David has had fifteen shows since completing school. This year he became the youngest artist to do a one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas. In Venezuela he got the reaction he was seeking. Critics described him as a painter of courage who develops his irony by utilizing sarcasm and a fresh, rotund manic humor”. The show at Trinity will introduce his work to an American audience for the first time, and the gallery’s Doug Macon should be congratulated for bringing such talent to Atlanta.
Though his art, David proves that age isn’t a factor in the ability to make profound statements about the world around us. “What saddens me is that after thousands of years the only system we look up to is the system of democracy. It’s the best system we have, but it certainly isn’t perfect”, he says.
What you won’t find in the collection are portraits of women, such as Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who has sparked an outcry over tax reform. But David says if he were to paint her, he would depict her as the Virgin Mary. “She’s just as famous and she’s totally pure in that she believes what she is doing is completely right”, he says. “But we will see how much she is the so-called Iron Lady next year when inflation is shooting up and everyone is on strike”. Whether he’s dealing with iron or irony, this painter knows how to get his message across and is gladly received.

Luanne Saunders.
Creative Loafing. Atlanta October 1990

Exhibitions

2018 CHIMeRES, Galerie Space 148 , Alfortville. France
2017 Conversations with Al Zheimers. IDB Gallery. Washington DC
2015 Doppelganger, No Format Gallery. Londres
The Ant Trail. RED Gallery, Londres,- Summer Mix, Turps Gallery, London
2014 Conversations with Al Zheimers, Husk Gallery, Londres
Brutal; Black i Gallery, Paris. France
2012 Talons, tabues et talismans. Black i gallery, Paris
2009 Biennal Miguel Otero Silva, galeria Ascaso. Caracas, Venezuela- Prix peinture
2008 She forgot the Future. 2021 Gallery, Atlanta. USA
2004Carlos David, Espace culturel 148, Alfortville. FR
2003Une rivière d’Art. Rue de Montmorency, Paris. FR
Carlos David / Cunéo, Space Africaustral, Paris. FR
2002Recent Paintings, Macon & Co Fine Art Gallery, Atlanta. USA
2001Liver, an exhibition. Installation at. Mangobajito café, London. UK
2000La Vida Esplendida de Neli Mªdel Mar, CELARG, Caracas. VE
Homenaje a Miranda. Academia de la Historia. Caracas. VE
Edgar Guinand, Carlos David, Galeria Minerva, La Victoria. VE
1999Macon & Co Fine Art, Group Show, Atlanta. USA
Carlos David. The Vine, London. UK
1998Carlos David - Eoghann, Recent Works, Mac Coll Gallery, Edinburgh. UK
Recent Works, Morley Gallery, London. UK
1997Recent Paintings, Macon & Co Fine Art, Atlanta. USA
1994Recent Acquisitions, Museum of Contemporary Art, Caracas. VE
Language and Location, Caja de Madrid, Barcelona. ES
1993The Blue Room, Bolívar Hall, London. UK
Recent Paintings. Art Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C. USA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Santo Domingo. RD
1992Special Arts Gallery, Washington D.C. USA
From The Contemporary, Bolivar Hall, London. UK
1991Art 92, Olympia, London. UK
Carlos David, Galeria Funda-Lara, Barquisimeto. VE
1990El Enigma de Pedro Miguel Candela, Museum of Contemporary Art, Caracas. VE
IMF, Washington DC. USA
Grand et Jeunes d'aujour d'hui, Grand Palais, Paris. FR
Trinity Gallery, Atlanta, GA. USA
1989 21st International Art Festival, Chateau Museé, Cagnes-sur-mer, Nice. FR
4 Giovanni Disegnatori del Venezuela, Italian Institute of American Art, Rome. IT
Latins in London, Bolívar Hall, London. UK
1988Grand et Jeunes d'aujour d'hui, Grand Palais, Paris. FR
19874 Newcomers, Bolívar Hall, London. UK
La Dicotomía de Isabel, Centro de Arte Euro Americano, Caracas. VE
19864 Young Newcomers, Galería Venezuela, New York. USA

1982-1985

Feedback. Canning House, London.
Consort Gallery, London
Nelson Mandela Studio, London
City Art Centre, Edinburgh