He paints
On his canvases there are no birds, no flowers, no clouds at first glance, no face, no body, no object or living being consciously represented by his brushstrokes. To this day, he insists on only painting… colors!
As a young man, talking about painting, it was as if he was issuing a warning: “knowing everything is a dangerous attitude”. Make no mistake, this was not a statement of immature rebellion, but more the beginning of asceticism. Believing that what you know depends on what you have learned traps a man in one part of his memory and separates his inner world from the outer world around him. Anyone who thinks this feels apart, separated from others and from the world into which they were born. His abilities, his actions and his decisions seem to depend solely on the mass of information he has stored and on which he can draw at will.
The more he knows, the more he considers himself powerful, like a teenager who believes in his physical strength, being arrogant both to reassure himself and to impress others.
As if this knowledge were “reality”!
Victor seems to be trying to do what he doesn’t know how to do; paint from a position where he doesn’t need knowledge to be. He’s trying to connect the deepest depths to vast horizons, the worker to his work and the viewer to art.
Victor is part of this world and he knows it. The inner man cannot be separated from the outer. How can you pretend, as a human being, not to be the continuation and transformation of things that already existed?
Over the years, the attempts, the doubts, the incessant questioning and the hard work left their mark on his face, proof that the path he chose was not an easy compromise with life’s difficulties.
His colors began to vibrate and breathe without demonstration or explanation.
In exhibitions, the comments often demonstrate the problem of contemplating the unknown:
“-Would you say it was a woman?” ”-Oh look, it’s like the entrance to a cave…!”
How difficult it is to look at the simple movement of life, whose echoes guide us to infinity, submerging all our references and our desire to define, isolate and limit!
But many others stop too, impressed by this life, scarcely revealed, touched by feeling it so close, provoking the vertiginous sensation caused by the connection between the known and the unknown.
Contemplating his paintings is like getting to know, discovering the other, whose true identity always eludes us until the last minute, taking us as far as the intimacy of love and physical combat. This “Other” that we can love, however, if we give up trying to define it.
Victor paints.
There, on the edge of his memory, trying as hard as he can to escape it. He makes me see what I can’t know but can feel, a silent invitation to rid myself of my arrogant assumptions of thought.
Is it useless nowadays to be wary of the shackles of information?
He paints the attempts to be there, in his own life, without saying anything either to me or to himself.
He’s a painter: he paints.