Collection: Yasiel Elizagaray

[ BIO - STATEMENT - ARTISTIC CV ]

Unsettling similarities.

[An approach to Yasiel Elizagaray's liminal portraits].

Curator: Fernando Castro Flórez.

It is not easy to compose a countenance, especially at a time when everything leads us to, literally, "lose our heads." Yasiel Elizagaray, with an unbridled passion, grounds his fertile imagination in faces that he associates with the question of the liminal. He lucidly alludes to a "border situation," that is, to that threshold of uncertainty that could be associated with dream states or with the anthropological ritual "transition" that makes us part of the communitas. Beyond narcissistic regressivity, the "appearances" of this Cuban painter could be described as rites of passage (intensely pictorial) in which subjectivity (almost) dissolves into the spectral.

The notion of "vertigo" has been used in connection with Yasiel Elizagaray's recent works, and perhaps it is pertinent to insist on those turns that produce instability (the Greek ilinx that Roger Caillois revisited in his memorable analysis of games) to sustain the liminal gazes that decline from the paintings. Before these faces, we feel as if something "bottomless" is about to suck us in, and yet, they are countenances, beings that, however, seem to shed their "human" substance.

Christine Buci-Glucksmann raised the question of how to paint a portrait when the image-face collapses, the body is absent, and the violence of history turns the anonymity of death (loss of name, body, and face) into something as unspeakable as evil. Yasiel Elizagaray blurs the countenances; working with oil stick, he avoids "closing the contours" of the figure, attuning to Gilles Deleuze and Guattari's meditations on the moment when "undoing the face" is to escape the black hole of subjectivity.

There is an essential duality of the face (between the semiotic and an uncertain symbolism), just as we find an ambivalence in that "surface," the most unprotected part of the body and, essentially, the one that represents us. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas pointed out that in the face there is an essential poverty, being, at the same time, an exposed (vulnerable) corporal reality that "forbids us to kill." The countenance, in Yasiel Elizagaray's aesthetic, is a liminal zone, a surface where identity is diluted, the place of catharsis.

The face, which Simmel called the "geometric locus of intimate personality," is, in Yasiel Elizagaray's unsettling paintings, throwing questions at us that we are unable to decipher. Perhaps these "spectral appearances" intensify the awareness that art must maintain its enigma, the tragic condensation of the human as something fearsome and strained in a hope (despite everything). What challenges us from the paintings are not Medusa-like petrifications; on the contrary, the countenances are, paradoxically, evanescent and tremendously intense. Yasiel lets the paint flow without ever losing the figurative reference, the compulsion to repeat (strict modulation of obsession) of faces that need no mask.

If, as Hans Belting pointed out, the facies alludes to the natural face, inseparable from its bearer, unlike the vultus, the face animated by gestures, in the case of Yasiel Elizagaray's works, it gives the impression that all "naturalness" has been overflowed to derive towards the tonality, strictly Freudian, of the uncanny (that which is familiar and has become strange due to repression). This artist, who has expressed his interest in delving into emotions through composition and pictorial matter, converges with psychoanalytic "archaeology" to unravel layers of feelings that have ended up becoming "unconscious." We see "duplicated" or even "triplicated" beings; twin gazes enchant us, we experience an intense feeling of "helplessness," as if in these paintings there is a subtle and poetic demand for tenderness.

What Yasiel Elizagaray rescues and reveals from that prodigious "liminality" are unsettling similarities, gazes that remain in motion, awakenings (to use a pun) from dozing, hypnagogic images that do not need to be "deciphered" (it is enough to be open, I insist, to the heterogeneity of the metaphorical, in other words, to the restless tropology of the enigma). Let us recall the Roman practice of imagines, those masks of colored wax made by imprinting on the faces of the deceased which, as Georges Didi-Huberman points out in his essay on The Unsettling Similarity, are fundamental for the entire history, in the West, of similarity and image: "Similarity is unsettling because it ultimately offers the very material or vehicle of unsettling strangeness. We cannot be sure of similarities for long: where identity was outlined, we see the other re-emerge." Certainly, there are no certainties in the countenances that Yasiel Elizagaray "materializes"; the mirror barely reflects these beautiful spectral figurations; our gaze feels a vertigo that does not imply fear, but a strange pleasure. Something enigmatic (Real, in Lacanian terms) is at stake with these gazes at the limit of the Imaginary.