The following critics have also written about this artist: Frank Poper Milagros Bello Bélgica Rodríguez Carlos Silva Juan Carlos Palenzuela Katherine Chacón Roberto Guevara Graciana La Rocca María Elena Ramos Enrique Viloria Vera Federica Palomero

Utensils, Everyday Mithology
by Bélgica Rodríguez

"He who lives in harmony with himself, lives in harmony with the universe; for the universal order as well as the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a fundamental principle" (Marco Aurelio, 121-180 AD. Meditations)

Diego Barboza - Traces of the Imagery
Diego Barboza has lived in harmony with himself. He has lived with his passions, his excesses, his sad nesses and his happiness, sharing them all with his family, his fondest friends and above all with nature and the simplest things that surround him. The most important thing as an artist is that he has found the way to express this all in his artistic creation. The aesthetics of his work has depended upon his ethics of life as a human being and as an artist, thus following the most exact principle of the existence. The fundamental principle is that without any kind of concession, deviations and without noisy howls he has carried his work and his life through one same and coherent path. His existence has been deeply linked to art and vice versa.

A work rich in changes, important in its contributions, sensitive in its plastic expression and wide in its propositions, this still young Venezuelan artist of the world has propitiated a situation of collective communication, to use the same concept he gave to his plastic expressions in the sixties and which he defined as poetry in action. In that period when he was interested in conceptual-non conjectural art, he proposed the public performances he offered (in London and Caracas), which aside of being rigorously planned, were "carefully combined: its color shape, texture, to establish the relation element-public-space which resulted in a work of collective communication." Ephemeral manifestations evidenced by printed documents valid for the history of art in Venezuela. (1)

From his very beginnings, one of the characteristics of the work by Barboza has been the distortion of the image. As a constant, this distortion presents itself as the ideology, which animates his work, in which not a rebellious atmosphere is perceived, but a position transgressing reality of the human being and his context. Barboza transgresses traditional plastic codes controlling any medium he might select to express himself, whether drawings, performances, collage or paintings. Another constant has been his "concern about man, life and everyday (2).

About Life and Art
From the first and various encounters along our life, I have been close to the work of Diego Barboza. Some encounters were in the surroundings of the Morelos Square around the sixties. Then in London in the seventies and in Caracas in the eighties. Absent for a period and some shorter encounters in the early nineties, marked the recommencement of an old friendship. Friends are important for Diego whether present or absent. The present is a transition between the past and the future. It is the smallest portion of life. The present in Barboza's work is a remembrance of the past and a projection towards the future.

Diego Barboza started his career as a sketcher. Part of the history is the two drawings that were hidden by me, "Cyclists against agent 007 and the Cuatrero", both of 1963. There can be appreciated some characteristics present in the pieces to follow. If we fly from this date to the works made these days by the artist, it is evident the coherence of the plastic and stylistic process all along his career. From the beginning he was interested in figuration as well as the distortion of the image each time more accentuated in the inevitable process of continuity. Figuration and Distortion have been two basic elements in his formal language. Considered an excellent and rigorous sketcher, the decade of the sixties brought him great prestige, which still holds true. The rigor with which he treats the lines has allowed him to make them surrender to his expressive purposes, in order to create a form that fills all the formal valuation requirements. Here, the distortion of the shape is a plastic value as we already posted and also an ideology and in conclusion it is a personal decision of the artist to free his ghosts. After working with other means in the mid eighties he passed progressively to painting, arriving to his present work.

Theme and Image
In the presentation of the catalog of the solo exhibition in 1996, the works shown were defined by Diego Barboza as the continuity of his "plastic creed... without abandoning the freedom afforded to me by the constant encounter with truth which represents my relation with today and yesterday, as well as my vision of the future* (3). Continuing without limits.

Like every artist, he has resorted to his own existential experience and his environment to recreate the images that conform his themes. But they have been images "not poured in pictures of nostalgia because of their irrecoverability- experiences of the past and the illusive present- but in an actual connection of iconography and tense relations (some times evident, some times hidden)…" (4). They are images that bare a history brought to the present by the exorcism of a Demiurgic but not invented creation. The artist has structured a plastic context for them to exist as objects and ideas. An effective description allows the real object to sensibly express itself, obviating the narrative.
This way Diego Barboza states and expresses his subjective capacity to evoke the real (objects and utensils), in a pictorial context, as a phenomenon of a "baroque" plastic and existential feeling. The fear of emptiness becomes definitive of his interpretation of the whole composed by the different objects. The creative human space, referred specifically to the sensible experience of living the everyday of a table with different objects on top, to attach to those apparently insignificant things that have always accompanied him, to the laborious study of the great masters of universal art that excite him or the spiritual specialty of his performances in the street defined by himself as "poetry in action", interacts with the contemplation space of the spectator.

Still Life
The Still Life, or better said, its essence is the fundamental theme of the exhibition offered this year 1998 by Diego Barboza. The theme is no novelty, before or now but rather it is the treatment given by the artist as a conceptual and formal proposal the result of the exploration of his own personal experience and the historic-artistic research on the theme. Each one of the still lifes is an autobiographic fragment in various senses. As a whole they form a great personal landscape, the polysemic speech of which can be read and perceived in different directions. One of them, for example, would be the intimist view, on a personal and everyday sense of the artist and the seer, another, the heroic sense of the universal paintings and the great masters, and another, the transgression of the values of traditional painting.

It is the memories, the inherited objects (the little silver cup, the little shoe when he was one, the lamp stand when he was nine, the little things that became huge when inherited from the mother already gone) the utensils in his everyday mythology, such is the name of the exhibition an apple core which remains after being ate, plates, knives and forks, jars, glasses), that being so much real turn into a new space dimension, objective and subjective, were two perceptual situations are fused to see the reality of the object and what lies beneath, which to Barboza means "portraying the useable". These utensils of his everyday mythology, repeating themselves until becoming obsessions.

He also uses objects beyond his sentimental space. Those, which attract him in the street, in the fruit, store, the supermarket, a friend's house or when he is quietly sitting in the park, but those are accepted at first sight as possible participants in the "feast". There must occur an act of affective magic in order for them to enter his universe. Barboza makes it clear that in order to nurture his imagery "with other objects which are not mine, there must occur an infatuation, I have to fall in love with them". (5) Infallibly the artist needs the force of the affective and emotional aspect in order to ideally conceive his iconography, which at the end is going to be presented as a revelation. Barboza tests the material sentimentally searching for the way to express the motive of the painting.

Utensils appear in Diego Barboza's paintings from the binning of the nineties. The presence of objects on a table can be seen in works of 1992, which, with an ambivalent theme, can appear arranged for before of after a meal, a good example is the piece "After the Workshop". From that point his interest was intensified until his last series in 1998.

Now, his honored guests are the great masters of the history of universal painting, which have painted still lifes, to whom Barboza renders homage in his. Homage to Caravaggio is the surrender to the artist that painted the very first known in history, very specially invited to his workshop. Impossible not to be there the master of Aix-en-Provence, the great creator of beautiful still lifes, to whom he dedicates his Homage to Cézanne, and on whom is leans, plastically speaking, especially in his proposal of cracked perspective. When mentioning Cézanne we remember the words of Henry Brooks Adams "a master reaches eternity; there can never be told when his influence stops".

In a sort of visual paraphrasing, Barboza grabs a plastic situation when using, for example, some elements that appear in still lifes of the "Invited Masters". It is not about paraphrasing a character of a sensible and affective plastic atmosphere but about resolving the conceptual and formal problems posted in a personal exercise of intellectual reflection and the development of a personal plastic language. It is then that happens the complex process of deconstruction of the real objects and their construction on the surface of the canvas or paper.

His appropriations from Cézanne with his oranges, Caravaggio with his apples and grapes or Van Gogh with his sunflowers, cannot be referred to as desacralization, they are just intimate meditations held from the heart and guided by the love and a sense of beauty.

Formality
The series Beings and Utensils of Everyday Mythology (6) is conformed by still lifes that arise from notes and sketches made in the valued line, as mental and manual exercises made in the way of dislocated photography, but in perspectives developed as digital art. In more prosaic but maybe more poetic terms, the objects seem to be seen through the convex or concave mirrors of an amusement park. This resemblance is even clearer in the treatment of the human figure. In these notes he states the emotional relation between the artist and the individual and autonomous object. The objects subject to attract your attention, are first reconstructed in his work and then in the visual reality of the canvas or paper. The clear and orderly workshop that at some point appear as invaded by plates with remains of decaying food, bit or half eaten fruit, vegetables or petrified bread or by broken or well preserved objects. The food, as another autobiographical aspect, is an important part of the life of Diego Barboza. The still life appears like a life model in the workshop and there begins Barboza to work on the canvas, always from the inside to the outside until completing the whole area thus valorizing the first plane. That is how the table is served with the paraphernalia that characterizes the beginning or the end of a meal, or the still nature with its surface covered with a tablecloth filled with oranges or any other fruit. At the end the objects invade the space of the viewer. His presence is impossible to ignore.

The artist does not impose an artificial order to the configuration of the totality of the surface; he lets the objects to dictate or impose their forms according to their intrinsic qualities, exploring the structural possibilities of the lines and color. This results in vigorous images that when realized become ideas that are then expressed on the canvas. Barboza does not only work with the memory or at random. From the plastic point of view, the structure of the work has been calculated beforehand. The strong lineal arabesques and the energy of the color, produce an impact in the viewer that allows him to appreciate the physical strength of the non-aggressive images, which contribute to exact the feeling of tenderness that can be felt all over the pictorial surface. Aspects of cubism, movies, graphic computing, moving photography, enter the game when analyzing the structure of the painting, whether oil or pastel, being it necessary to add the baroque nature synthesized by the sinuous forms in permanent movement. The layers of paint are juxtaposed one over the other to structure a complex composition controlled by the artist. He knows exactly how to handle the forms and its contours so that they are not dispersed o messed on the surface, thus formulating a perception of the space and depth in movement.

The structure of the work begins with a perspective in planes, from the first inbound, in a connection contrary to the way the artist works, which parts from the inside to the outside. It is a perspective that gets closer to the proto-cubism of Cézanne that conforms itself as a cinematographic idea that cracks. The objects are touched by a series of diagonals established by the direction followed by the straight lines imposed by the forks, knives and other elements presented by the artist with a certain rigidity as compared with the undulations of the other images, such as the profiles of the chairs for example. These diagonals prevent the dispersion of the images, realizing them on the surface they inhabit. In his distortion of the images they are registered in the pictorial space thanks to the color and its significance in connection one to the others, as well as the rhythm that concretizes the composition of the pictorial field. The arrangement of the objects-forms creates a dynamic tension on the pictorial plan. The illusion of depth does not exist as an illusory representation but as an interaction between form and color. Upon resolving the plastic problems in a first plane seen from beneath, the matter of the pictorial and affective space in connection with the space-time is satisfactorily solved by Barboza thanks to the sentimental component. His interest is to relate space and figure in a way that the action, the imprint, the Being, represent a feeling of his own. He sees the relation space-time as a feeling" (7)

Epilogue
To Barboza the essence is more important than the theme. The Being is present in his absence in the objects. The past is the main character of an actual fact as in After Dinner or After Lunch. It is the exploration of the feelings inside and outside himself and the things. In 1988 he stated that for him, art was "continuing exploration, a constant search within a reality that still offers to me multiple possibilities" (8) Today and tomorrow this reality still offers him "multiple possibilities".

Bélgica Rodríguez
Caracas, February 1998

Notes:
1.- Catalog of the exhibition at the Central Public Library "Dr. Julio, Padrón" Maturin, s/f
2.- Conversation with Yasmin Monsalve, Caracas, August 1996.
3.- Catalog of the exhibition at the Gallery Juan Ruiz Maracaibo, June 1996.
4.- Carlos Silva. Catalog of the exhibition at the Centro de Arte Euroamericano. Caracas, September 1991.
5.- Conversation between DB and BR.
6.- From a text by Carlos Silva.
7.- Interview with Moraima Guanipa. Daily El Globo, March 1993.
8.- Statements to the newspaper El Universal.