Nada De Vida Interior | Rolankay

For me, drawing and painting are inseparable phenomena, two sides of the same structure. The first time I felt "I have something here" was with a drawing, which was a decisive experience. By then, I had been painting constantly for a few years, exploring different directions without finding much. At one point, I decided I needed to return to drawing. Returning to drawing means thinking about life through drawing. A tree is vertical on a horizontal; the multiplicity of vertical parallels creates a forest. The decision was entirely practical: painting is expensive and takes much more time than drawing. Additionally, I felt that everything flowed more easily if the image I was working on was interesting or at least moderately good.

 

What I needed then was to understand what I wanted to imagine, which has a lot to do with understanding what you like, a structure of attraction. Liking something is not the same as knowing what you want. Imagination is an exercise that completes experiences and fills in the subjective gaps. The exciting thing I discovered then is the quality of the experience in the line's journey. The gesture and movement of the stroke are events in themselves, and the essential part is not how the image is completed but its path and development, the ability to generate tension between loose and fixed lines, between an ellipse and a closed angle. The multiplication of these differences projects the image, and in its syntax, its strength manifests.

 

What is essential, then, is uninterrupted communication in its execution. Understanding, being inside the paper. It's a focused meditation that follows a point along its path. The act of drawing is unique and unfolds over time in a single direction, like the experience itself (when it's completed, its memory becomes an image). However, it is essential to care for its fragility, to approach it and wait for it to come closer. Something similar happens in painting, or at least the experience I enjoy in painting relates to this. I need to feel that I am inside the painting and nothing else. The kind of painting I have always liked turns concepts into facts. The execution itself is the subject of the painting, and to the extent that this execution has life, it projects reality onto the image.

What Bacon admired about Van Gogh (or Velázquez) was their ability to infuse their images with effervescent life. The gesture or manner of painting is a concept since it reveals an abstraction of a phenomenon. It is very similar to the experience of a narrator who narrates without knowing what is happening. He is within the events; his very life is a form and expression of those events, and what gives reality to the experience of these concepts are their surfaces and effects.

In Emilio Renzi's diaries, Piglia says: "No inner life, only facts, actions, places, circumstances that, repeated, created the illusion of a life. An action-a gesture-that insists and reappears, saying more than anything I could say about myself."