Humanistic solemnity and conscientiousness in the orphean images of Natalia Conde’s Painting

By: Abil Peralta Agüero 

Each moment of social, political and cultural history of humanity is expressed as a print, a stamp or an emblem in the artistic iconography that man, in each of his respective degrees of civilization, marks in a cavern, a wall, marble, cloth or wood.

That is the case of the extended iconographic gallery that the lower Paleolithic man left recorded in the gallery of images tha magically expresses the primitive intuition and drawing in the caves of Lacaux and Altamira. This can also be seen in the aesthetic memory of the Hellenic art, Romantic art, Italian and Spanish Renaissance, French Romanticism or more recently in the dramatic critical manifestation belonging to the aesthetic codes of Modern Art.

As a link interacting between the most diverse proposals and typologies of the history of art, we warn that the theme, the critical thinking of art focus on the affirmation of drama and the social commitment as direct referents of human redemption needs. Humanity, through an invisible voice claims and will always claim the artist as the most authentic holder of the voice that thinks for everybody.

The dominican painter Natalia Conde, discovered by the dominican master sculptor Antonio Prats Ventós, has decided, according to what her pictorial signology projects, to be a particular artist. Not an artist from the peripherical history but one of those who take the responsibility, the right to rip the veil of  human conscience, claiming the truth of faith, the depth of wounds and the painful signs that have marked history from the time of our origins, expressed through individual and collective violence, love erosion or war wickedness.

She is an artist who sensibly prophases the urgency of peace and asks for psalmist actions against war in her hieratical pictoric scenes.

Natalia Conde's neo figurative formulation gets drama as part of an epic and solemn vocabulary that from her orphean atmosphere denies all theatrical scenes in order to be translated or to evoke a climate where symbol prevails. All these achieved from the fornulation of aesthetic phenomena expressed through the potencialization of spectral light, dense color, sectional glaze, vaporous texture, internal drawings and a volumetric movement near the sculptural rhythm in the anatomic exposition of bodies. Exposition that in Pero della Francesa or El Greco succed in slating visual phenomena ruled by a strong internal plastic tension.

Her painting emerges from the exercise of a focalized look to the substance of conscience of history. The windingly shape of bodies that she designs, structures and integrates in her cloths, a delicate volumetric form, creates states pertaining to the spectator's eyesight from a tension between volume and movement. This is provoked as a perceptive phenomenon seeing in a “gathering” way, the dramatic mass of naked bodies manifestating complete absence of psychological action.

By using chromatic resources, shown in her cloths as alchemic colors, abrasive, almost sour, we can appreciate vibratic and long mystical transubstantial figures due to non-visible flares. These flares have taken away materiality from their souls. Her art is emotive and spiritual, enriched by the iconic images of solid bodies that lead us to critical thinking.

These are, in her works of art, bodies that in their lost of faces retain a enigmatical identity that could be any of our faces. Faces that show possible victims in any scenario from the war of violent barbarism that today attack humanity from everywhere.

Her daring chromatism, treated over the cloth as fotagge, harmony, spirit and the dramatic splendor of her compositional structures lead us to remember the mass of angels of “Asunción” shown in Cinquencento Corregio or Rubens' flamenco in his celebrated painting “los horrores de la Guerra”, painted by the Duke of Toscana and where the painter wrote “this lugubrious matron dressed in black is the unhappy Europe sad for so many wars, rapine, outrage and misery”.

The artist enlarges the composition of her internal architectural harmony with the balance of tones and dominant rhythms that accentuate in her dramatic and symbolic spectrum the overlapling of nude bodies that take and reflect light units. These units provoke powerful reflective sensations and mystic states in the spectators, both over the pass of life and the terrible auto destructive capacity of humanity.

1n occasions the painter, showing her great dominium of volumetric and visual composition, constructs scenes in which we perceive mixed up bodies horizontally, diagonally and verticality. This last expositive linearity is accentuated by the dramatic plastic movement of motionless bodies ready to lay on the floor, showing a strong symbolism among the fragility of life and human condition.

These dense plays of luminic effects provoke a cataclysmic sensation in the perceptive look. The artist gets them from her capacity to administrate the force of her interior drawing, stylistic resource that she makes prevail both in her works of art with a strong dramatic accent and in those where she celebrates the ancestral identity or manifests the unsoundalbe laborious study of the orphean.

In Natalia Conde's art acts and plastic initiatives operate over the cloth, from her personal perspective, her aim at the conscious destruction of the visible world and it’s later reconstruction. This is her way of activating internal forces that are true to her creative identity, getting closer to the complex aesthetic phenomena that Paul Cezanne defined as "Pettit sensation".

Drawing, design, equilibrium, rhythm and romantic compositional structure, plus her intuitive and sensible administration of the foreshortening in her bodies, make these paintings owners of an atmosphere usually defined as a state of permanent evaporation, personal creation. Natatlia Conte's art is near symbolist painting, gathering the aesthetic priority with the social aspect, holding consciousness clearly defined in her semantic and visual temperament.

The capacity of linking sources from reality and from the unconscious, let us appreciate her stylistic phenomena as sensitive experiences ruled by a strong philosophical sense of humanity, existentialism, and spirit.

This is as if the artist wants to set up the dream republic in her canvas so as to prevent scenes as dramatic and apocalyptic as the holocaust, the Balkan war, September 11th.

We believe in this kind of aesthetic, philosophical and conceptual manifestation. Her sensibility and creative conscience makes evident in each of her canvas rigor in design, constructive spirit, dynamic harmony and wise games that lead her art to states of equilibrium and depth. All these features speak very well of her creative capacity as an artist who all along her career has preferred developing a discrete artistic personality, away from the banners that announce the more and more complex show of art in our days.

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"Sobre las huellas, camino" Museo de las Casas Reales. 22 de Marzo de 2005.

Santo Domingo. República Dominicana.