“In today’s landscape, where art is too often reduced to entertainment or to a mere conceptual exercise, Borondo’s new cycle of paintings asserts itself as a demanding meditation on the very nature of painting,” states curator Cesare Biasini Selvaggi.
“Born in inner shadow and from a rejection of worldly distraction, this series is a descent into the abysses of figure and matter, where the act of painting once again becomes ritual, catharsis and memento mori: a threshold on which the visual gesture bears witness to time and to humanity’s nostalgia for the eternal.”
Drawing on a well-established technique that uses glass plates as the painting surface, with the color applied to the reverse side of the work, Borondo welcomes accident and the unforeseen, relinquishing absolute control over the final image. The layers of matter, spread directly with the hands or with cloths, are furrowed by searing flashes of gold and silver leaf.
In the large figurative agglomerations such as Trittico della Discesa, Frangia and Babel, human anatomies crowd together and crumble: seen up close, the body disintegrates into abstraction, evoking the twilight visions of the flesh. Elsewhere, in compositions of rawer essentiality such as Cavallo, Eclisse or Uomo Luce, the image resurfaces with the solemnity of an early twentieth-century photographic plate or a forgotten relic.
In continuity with the lesson of the great masters – from Goya to Rembrandt, from Byzantine icons to the opacities of the Baroque –, Borondo restores to painting its role as a bridge between the everyday and the unknowable, staging the crises and conflicts of our present.
Gonzalo Borondo. Sull’imbrunire
curated by Cesare Biasini Selvaggi
21Art Treviso
