I
To address the world of popular culture, of traditions, of inter-ethnic relations, is of crucial importance for the critical study of art in contemporary times. The broad, tough, and blurred terrain of contemporary art has been circumscribed by domains of experience that have greatly overcome its conventional boundaries and legitimating processes. Hence, questions that are restricted to the realm of insufficient answers call for work to be done on a particular object. Exploring the territory of what constitutes cognitive objects involves formulating questions and, systematically, promoting a critique of the sources and procedures that have comprised contemporariness, producing new interpretations and worlds of understanding. In the last decade, questions that had been enunciated as forms of ethical engagement in the artistic environment have now become both interested and interesting parties of the means and modes of production. This, combined with the incorporation of new geographies, allows us a more accurate view of the constitution of the art object in its relational mode with the world of events. What is at stake here is not Bourriaud’s relational concept, as a supposed paradigm of the relational nature of artistic practices, but rather the way such relations produce new objects and the way such objects began to challenge once more and redesign relations in view of reality. When we began this curatorial project, a Sé Gallery partnership between Maria Montero, Dalton Paula, and I, our perspective was that of the artwork’s rise in maintaining the quality of its relationship principles with its creating world; of the artwork’s anteriority; of the non-loss of all the events swarming around us in the shape of dialogues, the project at hand, the workmanship, the production, all within a wider economic and symbolic circuit.
II
Dalton called my attention to a peculiar way of hovering in the passage between various languages without the urgency of hyper-relevance or of a revelation concerning the media he uses. His artwork, still a recent one – a circle involving a period that spans almost five years – did not have the media as its focus. Nevertheless, he was capable of making us turn our attention to the demands of an event as well as to the media which would best reveal its state. His trajectory, which started in painting, expanded towards the fields of photography, video, and various forms of performance and later returned to Painting, as a way to show the reader-observer-perceiver just how much demand is placed on us, in terms of distinct speeds and images, to understand the present reality. Broadening medias involves revealing the very multiplicity of the artist’s interpretation and his/her brief exercise in theorizing the very object under construction – art. From the start, the necessary care such an approach required led me to follow a comparative work method, which enabled me to open up to Dalton’s frequent observer – together with my personal experiences – ways of thinking relations of time-space, speed, sensitivity to the ways of seeing, living in and with the city, with blackness, with symbolic organizations, with traditional thought.
III
Dalton exposes some of the enigma of dechronization caused by images in human sensitivity. Resorting to the effort and power of the present, his work is effectively capable of condensing worlds and diachronies, long and distended temporalities and short and ordinary spans of time.Therefore, he points out the assimilations and confrontations that take place within the process of academic training and introduction to the art world, all part of his obsession for formalizing principles, for the establishment of pure visibilities and stylization which expose the covert presence of the great models of classical thought. The tyranny of perspective is adopted and turned upside down by Dalton in his affinity with the rhythmic logics of drawings, sketches, and plans sprung from the matrices of popular culture and, more particularly, from its African origins of lines and symmetries. Dalton’s anthropophagous world is a new rendering of an incorporation and an incarnation. It is not enough to devour the other. One has to incarnate him/her. This is how his works reveal to me the silent and abundant currents between different worlds and traditions, all of which consolidate the mythical element and broader ethnic and cultural realities.
IV
It is up to the curator – as both a historian and a critic – to think about art and images through the window that they change into. Hence images are symptoms because they point right at the carnality of that which cannot become a fully signified sign, a stable significance. In the world produced by Dalton, the stability of form, of symmetry, of composition, of colour, is confronted with meanings that tend to rarefy, that are able to indicate rotten states and the traces of our gods, our events, our daily life. Such is its power. It expresses through images the invisibility or the presence of a devouring deep which refers to the notion that no state, not even that of the search for the pure colour, prevails. The symptomatic reading in Dalton’s work transports painting devices to the world of photography, video, and performance, disturbing temporality – in a combination of accuracy and speed of register and documentation – with an enigmatic instance of the sign-symptom which characterizes the state and labour of painting. Dalton is not a video artist, a performer or a photographer. All he does is subvert and contaminate these medias which are suitable for his endless search for languages, ones that are able to represent the field of events and expose the heterogeneity imposed by technique and by technology within the visual regimes of our time. There is a flow of states in his photos, videos, performances, and acts of painting. This allows us to live, intensify, and highlight the commotion and pathic – affectionate – dimension of all that he shows us and makes us see without the desire to signify.
V
And a peaceful and imperceptible earthquake wrecked the city…
‘FOR THE LOVED ONE GOT INTO A CAR AND IT WENT ROLLING AWAY, AN IMPERCEPTIBLE AND PEACEFUL EARTHQUAKE WRECKED THE CITY, THE HOUSES, THE GARDENS, THE SKIES, AND THE BIRDS KEPT ON FLYING DESPITE BEING DEAD’. (BERNARDO ÉLIS)
Just as in the poem, things remain. Ecstatic. Ecstasic. Nevertheless, they show their dimension of death and lethality. Their objects are imprisoned in the time, myriads, and shreds of simultaneous presents that remain contaminated by enigmatic and ancient dimensions. They are flying bags. They are golden buttons. Saints. Demons. Communication or receptacle. Images are complex not only because they can form a concise map of the density of the narrative field. They are complex because they can be distended and act in many, many time spans… At the end, the rain will cover far-off hills in cold white, like a kind ghost. Dalton himself makes the gesture of the artist who emulates the ghost that populates and evokes dead zones in the city. He appears. He is an apparition in the field, in the landscape, in the old city, in the new city. He performs with his action, his intention – his artistic will – like a visual Élis, producing that icy caress, which strokes and provokes the quiet city, the silent city, the hidden city, the obscure city, the city in its margin and marginalization. Body, body, and a state of contrition in the closed eyes turn performance into meditation. Dalton goes on performing and unveiling in his compositions the continuing power of art so that, with his precarious, dead-hand gestures, he is able to blur with images the repression and silencing of so many acts of oppression. And lastly, as Élis prophesizes, he will finally ‘wet the mystical gathering of the great trees’.
