Painting in the Romance countries - and this cultural area also includes the whole of South and Central America, perhaps a little beyond - presents itself (as always, apart from the proverbial exceptions) on all levels more colorful, more fiery, more direct, more pathetic, but sometimes also more light-footed, more joyful and freer than that of the Germanic, Slavic, Nordic or whatever you want to call the non-Romance cultural area of Europe. A glance at general exhibitions and publications or the journals of all these countries of the huge and increasingly lively and strong Romansh cultural area is enough to establish this. These other prerequisites must be taken into account when looking into this area, also in this exhibition of some important groups of works by Dario Basso, which allows such a view of contemporary art in Spain and its cultural area.
Darío Álvarez Basso was born in Caracas in 1966 and grew up partly there and partly in the Galician city of Vigo in Spain, surrounded by an intellectual family with strong inclinations towards painting and literature. After a brief interlude in the rock and comic scene, he spent three months at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1984 and joined the Talleres de Arte Actual at the Circulo de Bellas Artes. Dario Villalba, Eduardo Arroyo and Frederic Amat awakened his vocation there and introduced him to art and the art world.
Without any further training, the twenty-year-old immediately began a work that is still restless today, entrusting all his initial ideas and information to the "Libreta", his constantly accompanying sketchbook. What is laid out there in the most delicate strokes and wash-like tones can develop on canvases up to five meters high into the most violent and heavy compositions in centimetre-thick paint or tar with various collage inclusions. The self-taught artist makes use of completely unconventional means, often painting or even pouring his pictures horizontally on the ground outdoors in nature, incorporating the surroundings and the weather as well as direct or indirect forces of nature or even the genius loci in myth or history. It rained or hailed on many of his works, and he washed some of them in rivers.
Basso's work is also extremely diverse in terms of content and has an enormous geo-cultural-political universality. He has set himself the task of merging cultures past and present, history, myth, religion, legend, literature, philosophy and science, in particular the East with the West. In 2004, the thirty-eight-year-old was able to present a comprehensive touring exhibition of his work in many South American countries with the help of the Spanish "Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation", which is exemplary in this respect, and its sub-organizations, accompanied by an opulent catalogue . Basso's installation "Algorithmi dixit", consisting of 23 desert tarpaulins measuring 4.3 x 2.5 m painted in portrait format, paraphrases of Arabic ornamentation, is currently touring the capitals of the Middle East. Basso's work is mainly exhibited and collected in Spain, Portugal, Venezuela, the USA, Germany and Switzerland, where Othmar Triebold discovered this painter very early on and exhibited him for the first time in his gallery in Basel in 1990.
Basso not only grew up in a cosmopolitan family in two cities, two countries and two continents, he also moved on as a wanderer between worlds and has continued to do so artistically between abstraction and figuration to this day. Until 1987, he painted fierce dark figures against a light background in Madrid in the "spirit of the times". He then moved to Paris for two years. There, his paintings on irregular canvases found somewhere, albeit with very specific titles and Arabic inscriptions, tend to be dominated by concrete, precisely separated forms such as saw blades or circular saw blades, which he may have seen rusting there during a brief stay in Morocco.
While still in Paris, his memory of the Muslim-Christian conflict in medieval Spain reminded him of the similar, even earlier conflict between Carthage and Rome, which also had its critical center in Spain with Hannibal's starting point. After all, Hannibal was the only one who could have seriously jeopardized the rise of the Roman Empire. This tough and by no means clear-cut or brief power struggle was already a battle between East and West, a clash of civilizations, as Carthage came from the East and the Roman Empire is a direct and still tangible precursor of our so-called Western culture today. The scholarship at the Spanish Academy in Rome in 1989/90 and a photo of half the ceiling of the Pantheon led to the compositions of the Hannibal theme that now accompany the work.
In 1990/91, he was back in Paris, dealing with political and social issues of the world and painting its continents. In 1991/92, after a stay in Senegal, he worked again in Italy, in the small Umbrian town of Pissigano in an abandoned church. The frescoes still visible there reminded Basso daily of the entire history of art there, but above all of its underlying spirituality, which inspired him to create "seeing" pictures that look at the viewer.
A Fulbright scholarship took him to New York in 1992-94, to the present and to the human being, who was treated in its entirety in the "Libretas", but reduced to a central "spine" in the larger works. Basso was back in Madrid from 1995 to 1998. He drew a first sum, walked the St. James' Way, on which he was particularly impressed by the bone finds of Neanderthal ancestors in Atapuerca, and for the first time put together whole walls of half a hundred of his works, his photographs and reproductions of objects, views and excerpts that inspired him to create "Antropogeografias".
This led to an increase in collages, in which he also incorporated leaves from nature, resulting in "open-air studios" in the rainforest of Venezuela and the forests of the Dominican Republic from 1999 to 2001. He was particularly fascinated by the huge leaves of banana trees and palm trees, individually in portrait format, especially in the "Humboldt" series, or in star form as "Flowers to Andy". In the years 2002 to 2004, in Madrid, he again drew a sum from these diverse experiences and became increasingly involved with photography, including underwater photography, which he reworked and developed in long series.
In our exhibition we are showing a group of works from the "Spine Paintings" from 1994, the portrait-format single-sheet paintings "Humboldt", the Hannibal Pantheon motif, the "Flowers to Andy" motif, a series of more recent square (1x1m) pictures of vegetal motifs and finally the latest extremely color-intensive "cast" expressive abstract color reliefs of larger format from 2008 as well as two series proposals for Basso's photographic works, compiled as he did in his "Antropogeografias".
Dario Basso chose "The Journey of the Argonaut" as the title for this exhibition. It is his journey, the one briefly outlined above, and what he is showing is the Golden Fleece that he brought with him, captured adventurously, with great effort and not without struggles. Perhaps his last large color reliefs at the end of this exhibition can be seen as precisely this "Golden Fleece". Their radiance suggests this. We can retrace this journey episode by episode in the high hall of the project room of our art depot on its walls of varying heights, but we can also take a closer look at the colorful works, some of which are up to three meters high or wide, as individual works in a free environment.
Ingeborg Henze-Ketterer and Wolfgang Henze
