LA CRÍN PINTA LA CRÍN
El trazo corta el presente,
como un aullido de brea;
Un caballo que boquea
se desmorona,
imponente.
Suena un relincho silente,
y la crin pinta la crin;
sin apenas tinta, sin
piedad; con impaciencia
fugaz, como la existencia
pasa el pincel de Merlin.
Jorge Drexler, 19-3-2009
Austin, Texas
A LAP OF HONOUR IN THE BULLRING
There has always been a special and fertile relationship between bulls and art – partners who are usually on good terms with each other, a relationship approved by time and history. The art of los toros; bulls in art.
A fiesta such as bullfighting, with its profoundly visual nature, had to give great inspiration to a whole legion of artists, in such a way that los toros has become an authentic genre within art. I would add that this has been especially fertile and outstanding within the “ring” of our own painting (the map of Iberia so closely resembles a painted bull skin).
A ceremony that goes back to the darkest of times, to those first creations of the anonymous painter who worked with the hard and rough canvas of the caves (Le Tuc D´Audoubert, Lascaux, our own Altamira…). Rites and writing for an “ideal bullfighting museum”.
Later, so many names and men have added themselves to this imaginary gallery: Knossos, Pompeii, pre-Roman Iberia, Goya, Manet, Max Ernst, Solana, Francis Bacon, Barjola, Saura, Eduardo Arroyo … and, last but not least (in fact, quite the contrary) Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Is not Guernica perhaps the most impressive of all tauromaquias? “The bullfight of Guernica”, wrote César Vallejo, “in honour of the bull and of its pallid animal, the man”.
In the specific case that concerns us here, it is going to be this pallid animal, this man, that takes up the cape and the tools of his trade (killing, painting) to offer us another singular and personal vision of this perennial subject through a singular and personal Bestiario.
As the name suggests, the matter concerns animals and the vision that Daniel Merlín (Buenos Aires, 1985) offers us goes beyond the fiesta and centres its creative energies on the very figure of the bull, irreplaceable protagonist of this atavistic mélange a deux. The bull: power and presence, imposing mass of rotund black (if I may beg the pardon of its light-skinned charolés brother) – a dark kiss on the sensual skin of the canvas. The bull – a half-ton beast of inexplicable grace in movement – charges across these paintings with lustful eyes, seeking a red that appears only once as blood or as the matador´s muleta.
In contrast, the man, the bullfighter – colorful and tightly clad, playing (as Gregorio Marañón rightly noted) the feminine part in this mortal idyll – is only the presence of an absence. A stone guest at this painted banquet.
Alongside the bull is the other beast – begging pardon, once again – that participates in this ritual: the horse. The other, complementary, side of the same coin: against the bull’s bulk, the horse’s line; against density, levity; against the Dionysian, the apollonian; against shadow, light, against death, life.
Thus, the bull and the horse – together and equally – form the iconography that this young painter has chosen to represent another fiesta and another ritual: the ancient rite of painting. A play of light and shadow – not really so different from the faena of the bullfighter – where the artist takes the blade of his brush and the cape of his colours to invent his world. A task that is difficult, but passionate.
I want to make clear that, in spite of his scarce years and his many doubts, Daniel Merlín is a young-but-sufficiently-prepared painter. A true painter whose work is aided and abetted by his knowledge of how to season the sauces of the strange cuisine which we call painting.
He is an artist, then, who knows then how to paint. In today’s “Planet Art”, alas, this knowledge is no longer what courage is to the soldier or virtue to the wife of Caesar. He knows too how to write using a whole grammar – grey, black, dark – of forms, spaces, volume, gestures, brushstrokes, textures and lines.
These, then, are true paintings, well-constructed with a great economy of means. Paintings that are special and that are spatially illuminated by an ascetic – almost Franciscan – range of colours: earth tones, sepias, blacks, greys, some gold … Colours for times of crisis. Nonetheless, this monastic moderation of tones, strokes, forms and nuances, is sufficient to enable him to transmit to us a sensation that is tectonic, well-worked and tied together. A balance of light and shade, a tactile and living surface of undulating orography, where blots of diluted paint spill and drip – tears of ink and black blood. A bullfighter´s faena of such gestural and expressionist intensity that, I am sure, soon after he strikes with the tools of his trade (great experimental will and the search for new expressive languages), he will cut more than one ear and will receive more than one lap of honour in the bullring.
Francisco Carpio
San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Marzo de 2009
A MYSTERY TO TELL
Daniel Merlín, 23 years old. PAINTER.
Many young people paint and some paint well.
To be a painter – a real painter – at that age, is exceptional.
He came to us, just eight years old, from his native Buenos Aires.
At 11, in the life-drawing class of Álvaro Sellés, he provoked universal admiration with the extraordinary quality of his work.
Drawings that were not exactly those of a child.
Drawings with strength, knowledge and maturity.
Two years ago I saw his painting for the first time. In San Lorenzo de El Escorial, in Álvaro Sellés’ gallery. On entering the gallery, on the left-hand wall, a large-format painting dazzled me. A SEA. A prodigious sea, without horizon, without shore, without waves. Just that, SEA. All its profundity, its colour, its mystery. Then followed the others, the faces, the landscapes …. the work of an authoritative painter.
The gypsy bullfighter RAFAEL GÓMEZ “EL GALLO” was asked “what is bullfighting?” He replied: “To have a mystery to tell, and to tell it.”
Daniel has a gaze that is clean, direct, clear, and not without ironic smiles. At times this gaze escapes as if fleeing – not outwards, but inwards into the sensitive creator’s soul until, in pain and in pleasure, it finds the mysteries that are born inside. It obliges him to empty himself – to show with the language of his painting the emotion of a work that will force us to see, to look and finally to admire.
Many times it has been said: “in painting everything has been done.”
But not that everything has been told.
Daniel shows us, like a chosen one, that there are many things left to be told.
Now he offers us his BESTIARIO.
In this work Daniel “takes the bull by the horns” and puts everything on the line. On the edge of the blade.
The touch is agile, secure and audacious. In each picture, strokes attack – like the bull’s horns – with fatal intent and he stops them just at the right moment.
You hear the claws scratching the skin of the ground, the agonizing screech of the dying horse’s last whinny. The dust of the stampede will blind you.
Look at them. Admire them.
Daniel, perhaps, does not see us. His gaze escapes into his interior, to find a new mystery that he will have to tell us.
Daniel Merlín. 23 years old. An old painter who is being born.
José Alcázar
Painter