SILENUS
Reflection on the thought of Daniel López's work
Opening December 2020
In this art gallery of the Costa Rican painter Daniel López, you will enjoy a shower of aesthetic sensations that will break any sense of normality, to make us reencounter ourselves in our silences, through the image-voice of "SILENUS".
Silenus
Acrylic on canvas
30x25cm
2010
SHE
Existential tragedy:
We look for the origin of our spirit’s biggest will, the greatness of those men who extended their existential labyrinths between laughs and crying, like the kid who plays at noon with the sunlight falling to his face and not worrying about the future time, living only the present and enjoying in himself…
SHE
Color pencil on paper
21X15cm
2020
HE
These geniuses, orphans of the flock moral’s miseries, living in the permanent contradiction of the rivers from the dark erudite, that retires him self to his destiny’s mountain, waiting for the right moment to point to himself that rivers don’t turn back and follow only the becoming way of this insuperable reality that is tragedy, where the drops of to be and not to be are mixed, spilled in the anguish but at the same time cheerful life wisdom: cold, hot, sweet, bitter, day, night, war, peace, summer, and winter…
Video
HE
Color pencil on paper
21X15cm
2020
ENCOUNTER
Refugee in the mountains, right in the brightness of the night, it is heard the mystic scream of those female beings that had the wine god in their arms: falling to earth they run in ecstasy, they, possessed by the drunkenness, naked in the vital night. With the heat from their torches they dance to the flutes the dithyramb singings in honor to the god of the fruits and fertility; after staying in the shadows of the trees, they go out to searching for a calf to behead, obtain its blood and satiate the thirst of this parties. Their religion is no other than to live the delicious bite of the calf’s meat; there is no space to think in the “erudit” tautological arguments that walks thinking on how to take the being to the cradle of good, out of earth, to a categorical world where reality is constructed based on laws and gramatical rules…
Video
ENCOUNTER
Acrylic on paper
24x32cm
2020
OPENING
If we think on what made the greek culture to have that spirituality to laugh of themselves and win wars, like the ones that had with the persians in the battles of Marathon, lead by the general Miltiades, just like the difference that made them distance themselves from the other cultures, like the egipcians and mesopotamians, to the point of been proud of their nationality and disparage everything that wasn’t greek, with the name of barbarian; we should return to the god of the fruits, Dionysus celebrated in the origins of the tragedy, just like the first steps of the birth of the theater in the Aeschylus’ Greece and the god of measure, from the dorians art temperance, Apolo…
Video
OPENING
Color pencil on paper
21x15cm
2020
TASTE
Having in consideration the famous philosophical question that the Ionic naturalists makes to themselves about the origin of things, not looking now for the argumentation in pure mythical-religious principles, but detaching the search of the origin towards this two thresholds. The origin of things is investigated, from the 7th century BC, in principles related to nature, either with Thales to the water or with Anaximenes to the air…
Video
TASTE
Color pencil on paper
21x15cm
2020
DEEP
We must think why the question of the origin is going to take the route of total abstraction, first with the refutation to the Hyele erudite’s senses, linking the not to be to the false. Secondly, in the search of the “truth”, attached to the immutable being of Parmenides and its contraposition: to be is and not to be is not, which will reincarnate in the Socratic maieutic and will inhabit in the academic halls, finding answers in the cave, being to Nietzsche, the end of the free spirits vitality…
Video
DEEP
Color pencil on paper
21x15cm
2020
LEAK
When this truth is found already divided in a reality to the senses that deceive us, through the “mesh veil” and in opposition to this truth that is providing energy to the “Topus Uranus”, a world totally different to the one that the crying philosopher talked about; the greek theater will start losing its origin, it is incorporated to the tragic works of Aeschylus the dialogue that will forge the appearance of a second actor able to verify the knowledge’s duality. But who will finish the tragic vitality will be Euripides, using the socratic dialectic in the tragic conception of the world; now it is not the same person that is found as spectator and partaker in those parties in honor to Dionysus, but, it is the explanation now rationalized through the language that will forge us the dichotomy subject or object, in the theatrical representation…
Video
LEAK
Color pencil on paper
21x15cm
2020
SILENCE
“With posteriority, it was introduced the presence of characters in the scene, taken, however, just like masks of that original hero, along with them, the dialogue, apollonian element by excellence, that was progressively taking possession of the tragedy’s meaning and enriching it, until celebrate its apotheosis in the Aeschylus and Sophocles dramas.
This moment suppose an authentic culmination within this process of integration of powers of shots that gave space to the best and toughest tragic creations. Only with Euripides is precipitated the agony of the tragic-dionysian spirit, because in his works is produced the transit from the apollonian dialogue until the socratic dialectic, which now is not happy about sharing its main role with the other element member of the greeks life and culture, to even wanting to completely dominate”.
(Casares Barrios Manuel, Voluntad de lo tragico, page 92).
SILENCE
Color pencil on paper
21x15cm
2020
MEMORY
The apollonian element will enrich tragedy, will allow the greeks to find a balance between this two spirits, an dionysian-apollonian balance, but what will bury the people of Phidias and the Olympics vitality will be the presence of the dialectic on this civilization’s culture; privileging the theoretical optimism of science as the truth that underlies the explanation of reality; diverting the creator-poetic instinct that was found in the musical celebrations of the dithyrambic parties from the beginning of tragedies. Now keeping in the so sick Plato tools box, the greek’s childhood and the game that was the way to face the future paradoxes of life, eliminating this contradiction with the theory of the two worlds and its scientific logic that will later be uses as the base of the construction of the Saint Augustine’s city of god.
Video
MEMORY
Color pencil on paper
21x15cm
2020
GESTATION
Now we deal with a human society built based on ethical values, conceived by reasoning. In which exists a lot of reasons which we can disagree upon; should or shouldn’t we follow the reasoning in all cases? Some people stand against what they think reasoning is, to achieve satisfaction, emotions and passions. They think strong emotions are desirable, and those who feel strong emotions are not going to reason over them. Seems like someone who feels strong emotions should lose his mind and act stupid, for them to clap at him, for him to demonstrate hes passionate, but they don’t think this way when their own deceive has consequences that they don’t like. Reasoning is to choose the right means to achieve a desirable goal. “ It has nothing to do with the choosing of the goals and is, and only should be, slave of its own passions”…
Video
GESTATION
Color pencil on paper
21x15cm
2020
MEMORY
Reasoning may be only a virtue of the society that sinks in the sea of its own will, in the will’s power, in the endless return. Humanity in a constant opposition and becoming, existential tragedy, where human becomes more complex than any other animal regarding its impulses and wishes. From this complexity arises his difficulties, we know that he is not completely gregarious like ants and bees…
Video
MEMORY
Color pencil on paper
30x20cm
2020
RETURNING
We must admit two different elements in human’s nature, one social and other lonely. An ethic system which only counts with one or the other will be incomplete and unsatisfactory. Continuing the tragedy in religious terms, both of them appears separately in the gospel commandments: to love God and the fellow humans. To all who doesn’t believes in the traditional God, it will be required certain change in the terminology, but not a fundamental change in this values. Therefore, it can not be said that the lonely part of nature is less worthy than the social part. The mystic, the poet, the artist, scientific, etc., are the lonely deep inside of their being. What they do can be useful to others, and its utility can be an stimulation to them, but into it the moments when they feel more alive and achieving in the most complete way what they think it must be their function, they are not thinking on the hall humanity, instead they pursue an illusion…
Video
RETURNING
Watercolor and ink on paper
30x20cm
2007
CONSCIENCE
In the world that we find the big hopes and the horrible fears are equally justified by the same possibilities…
Video
CONSCIENCE
Coal on paper
12x17cm
2007
“ Every emotion of society is linked to an image, an abstraction of our conscience. One can see in a painting images that spill humanity in the emotional perspective. Gathers in a visual information something that can create in you some confusion, some discomfort, some anxiety. Images can be unpleasant and to wake the twisted things that are in society. I don’t acclaim any emotion negative neither positive. I search sensations that describes the society in its figures and shapes that can be amorphous, in its elements. It is an expresive exercise more than anything else.”
Daniel López
“The vision that is born from the return of the human being to its own nature can be used to discover the images, accompanied by perishable omens, manifests in the human conscious.”
Daniel López
“ By "psychosociety" I mean the society as an "entity", a living being that breaths, feels, thinks, digests, gets sick, throws up, defecates. In its whole it can be palpated and materialized in amorphous transformations”
Daniel López
This work is result of the cooperation between the author and an autonomous virtual lecture of political philosophy, which is an autonomous and self managed project.
CREDITS
Daniel López: Painting / Painter
Staging and Edition: Esteban Paniagua
Design: Eddy Cruz
Web Development: Cristian López
German translation : Carolin Leibmann
English translation : Oscar Vidal