1.
I understand that all art work always tells us something, the abstracts, those who I admire such as A. Tapies, even working in the apparent freedom of pure painting, in the dimension where painting paints itself, still they inevitably communicate. They are saying something. You may add here what you wish or feel : the suggested contents of your concsience projected as spectator on the wonderful ambiguity of the work: states of mind, psychic landscapes, emotional stress, fright or harmony, silence or sounds, etc.. They are telling us something about human essence as chronic or testimony , finally always telling a story.
When it does not, we are in front of decor and crafts.
2.
The cartoon, the comics has fascinated me in childhood when I was an addict consumer and do it now again. Actually when telling a story through drawing we inevitably add a dimension that paint does not have: time. As with the music and film. A cartoon and a story board are cousins. Many actual films scripts are based on comics, and strongly influenced by their aesthetics.
I think the series of my work ( I always work on thematic series) are perhaps, stories, scripts, where the paintings are the individual frames, images / pictures of it. Really what my paintings individually propose is the observation from different angles, different moments and circumstances of the object I explore.
I can walk around the subject, move, approach and retire from it as a camera in motion.
3.
On the aesthetic kinship, I am undoubtedly close to Pop with ties to the individual work of various artists. I try to flee from description, looking for synthesis and simplification of the figures without destroying them, keeping proportions and forms, but dodging the treatment of detail, fled the visible brushwork trail, trying to stay on flat surfaces and plain colors, the drawing line visible (as in the cartoons) so as to focus more attention on the subject matter, the story.
4.
In the silence before the genesis of an artwork, in that intense creative instant, I beleive the future image or picture is given to us, by our imagination, almost finished. What comes next is working, the material on which to work was given to us in an instant and is not the product of a conscious development. The intellectual work and manual process that allows the creation-production of that initial image/idea, is what takes place regularly in the atelier .
I do not believe in the possibility of starting a work without first having in sight the objective pursued, the image you're looking to construct, even if the same logics of the materials, plastic and aesthetic resources may lead you in relatively unpredictable directions. That initial image emerged spontaneously from the imagination is the only justification for the work, its contents, naturally carry the load frame and essences that make the difference between art and handcraft. The equivalence to diregard this initial image in the realistic portrait, classical or baroque would be to miss the model.
It seems crazy to me to start a work without the master plan grounded in the irrational mystery of this vision, simply building it as a Lego, a game for reinforcement, without soul, where the only objective is balance and composition.
Decor and art belong to different ontological dimensions.
5.
In the genesis of my work I always start with images that I catch on quick freehand sketches in order to prevent loss due to oversight, ( inevitable in a few minutes ).
Once I have a group of these, I can start the construction phase, I can move to the workshop and begin the development of these images in paintings. In most cases, the sketches reach their final stage producing a finished work, others wreck in the process, unable to reach the minimum internal tension art requires. The most interesting are perhaps those for whom my aesthetic resources and skill are insufficient to achieve the objective. These works are those which require review, new aesthetic guidelines to reach a successful conclusion, that is why these are revealing, marking the moments when you add a qualitative step, a small new step forward in the endless aesthetic discourse.
Eduardo Olascuaga
