23 Jan Dario Neira: NAKED WORDS
Dario Neira:
NAKED WORDS
curated by Olga Gambari
JANUARY 27-MARCH 11, 2023
Thu – Fri – Sat | 4 – 7 p.m. opening Friday, Jan. 27, 5 – 9 p.m.
EXTENDED UNTIL APRIL 4.
finissage with the event
NAKED WORDS :
A TALK BETWEEN THE ARTIST DARIO NEIRA
AND CURATOR OLGA GAMBARI.
TUESDAY APRIL 4 7 pm:
30 PEOPLE ALLOWED
R.S.V.P.
NB: FRIDAY MARCH 10 THE GALLERY WILL BE CLOSED
In life, in the end, it’s always a matter of skin.
The encounter, knowledge, sharing, love, and hate can only pass through the skin because the skin is that part, armor, and whisker together, which comes into contact with the other, the external, the outside.
Skin is always at the forefront, writes Chandra Candiani in one of her verses.
Lively and sensitive skin, resistant and fragile, it becomes a biographical diary, a witness of the identity to which it belongs, An identification document—an element of belonging common to all humanity. For Dario Neira, humanity is a large and continuous skin scape, as he defines it. It’s an irregular, metamorphic landscape, assembled with a mosaic of skins that are born and live, near and far, each a part of the whole of what we are as a species. A skin scape that translates his vision of the world, his eye educated in medicine. Where, under clothes, hairstyles, and frills, a man, a woman are naked, are bodies. They are covered in skin. They breathe and manifest themselves through the skin. And for a doctor, the skin becomes a field of investigation, revelation —even pity. And indeed, Neira went under the skin.
Men and women, old adults, girls, children, appear in his work as a choral human body beyond time and space, a mapping of the single and collective self that envelops and involves the very concept of humanity. Skin of skins, all different yet all the same when you undress, in the nakedness of birth and death, beings made of head and face, torso and arms with hands and legs with feet. Smooth surfaces and folds, but also pores, nails, and hair. Neira immerses himself in the photographic images of silhouettes found in the factory of bodies which is the iconographic mass media, precisely in the printed paper from articles and advertisements in magazines, a place of cannibal consumption of figures, stereotypes, fashions and models of humanity. A moloch that homogenizes, distorts, and dehumanizes. In that serial and alienating production, he sees the sparkle, the fireflies in the night. He looks for the man with Diogenes. In that infinite and plural archive, he sees, perceives, listens, and surgically cuts out fragments of skin, features, and physical glimpses. He transfigures them into as many fragments of an enormous abstract and free portrait, with an aesthetic rarefaction, which he has been working on for years. A monument to the human, of which skin is an instinctive and metonymic synonym. A collage that regenerates every day like the skin, which produces infinite elements of a hybrid and mutant creature, defenseless, lethal, and wonderful like the human being. An evolutionary and mystical vision together, parts of parts that die and are reborn in an organic and energetic, as well as visual, circularity.
A body, many bodies. At a certain point, Dario Neira also heard their voice, their need to give him the floor. Flesh and logos, this is man. So was Christ. The logos that creates and destroys, the revealed word that takes shape in the earthly carnality and elevates it.
The words chosen by Neira are naked icons with a universal symbolic value. Familiar words such as sick, courage, me and you, flesh, word, fear, and fragile. They belong to everyone. Together, written and spoken, they tell stories. They are real and imaginary lives: those that happened, those in progress, those that will come, and those missed, dreamed of, and lost. Ours, anyway.
Olga Gambari