User:Gerlinde Hobel/sandbox

EDUARDO GUELFENBEIN Chilean painter 1953 Rhythmic Paintings.. Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, Eduardo Guelfenbein has kept a psychological tie to his country of origin whose nomadic nature tends to accentuate. Chile now seems like an almost inaccessible refuge after his constant peregrinations between countries such as England, the United States, Italy, Australia and now Paris where he lives and works. For many years, Latin America kept their artists at a distance not affording them the liberty of expression and, above all, the liberty of criticism which enables them to create. As exiles, many artists from these countries, where violence, intolerance and corruption were the norm, developed an interior existence, nourished by the dream of lands bathed in freedom, light and colour. Guelfenbein is part of this diaspora who keep in their souls the anxieties and fears of their national experience but also the irresistible contamination of joy and delirious colour that the collective unconsciousness vehicles like some protest banner. From the very beginning Eduardo manifested his attachment to the chaotic universe of tropical atmospherics, mass movements where the individual is drowned by a devouring human wave. I particularly remember a very large canvas exhibited at the gallery PhD-Corso Italy in Milan in 1992 where undulating figures sculpted in colour move in explosive waves. The artist suggests by the movement of shades of bright reds, yellows , oranges, greens and blues the exciting vibrancy of a collective dance. The uncertain figures of men and women barely sketched have for a long time constituted the subject of predilection for the artist who fluctuated between the limits of figuration and the temptation of pure abstraction. The maturing of a painter is filled with struggle and revolution which the internal logic of composition and pictorial research drive towards the accomplishment of a mutation. Guelfenbein has today emancipated himself from the necessity of the image or representation and now follows a pictorial evolution by gesture and colour. All that remains is the movement of the paint and the explosion of colour supported by a creamy almost edible matter. The artist executes, with the rhythmic variations of his art, in the primary colours he has always preferred, a gestural acceleration free from all figural contingencies. His painting materialises pure form and the creative force in action, expressing the renewal of the themes and sources of inspiration that have always concerned him. Dancing is something he has often represented as symbolic of a culture close to his heart and is now inscribed in the paint itself. The artist models and tames the paint with his brush guiding its intricate meanderings where the ebb and flow designs a geographically magmatic universe. The metamorphosis of this effervescent material  gives birth to bas-reliefs where the colour melodies and plastic sensuality of the pictorial touch brings on a 3-dimensional whirlwind. For Guelfenbein, the accomplishment of a painting is not the result of an iconoclastic desire of Mathieu or the liberty of vindication for Pollock. Guelfenbeins gestural painting inscribes itself in a particular movement of artistic conception where the aesthetic, almost classic characteristic was the idea of pleasure in the work, as in the voluptuousness of Matisse in Joie de vivre. With Guelfenbein we could almost talk of an abstract impressionist integrating colour divisions which define themselves in zones without really mixing. The chromaticism is  brilliant, explosive almost screaming  and its intensity is brought on by colours that are always primary and neither cut nor mixed, exasperating by the contrast established between them.The hills and valleys which are constructed by the thickness of the paint highlight this vitality while giving the work a powerful expressivity. The force which is liberated brings an aesthetic message which shows the power of paint to authorise the seduction of the eye and of the senses, shocked by the explosive impact of the colours and signs engraved on the canvas. The material of the work is imprinted by a tactile undulation, a visual softness that communicates a vibrating sensation which is almost air born. With Guelfenbein the core of pictorial matter itself is shown by a bodily expression which substitutes all representation. The play of colours is festive and musical, sometimes dark and menacing and always overwhelming suggesting the immensity of an erupting magmatic universe. His painting is in communion with the earth, its vital energy and the enigma of life itself. To this end, his use of the “tondo” a large round canvas that the artist has integrated recently into his pictorial use and is appropiate to the fullfillment of the expression of his style. These circular compositions show to advantage the earth in movement driven by its mysterious variations. Guelfenbein has faith in the future and his work inspires and creates emotions of harmony. Dominique Stella