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Besmar: Hierophanies
In appreciating the paintings of Joel Besmar, we are met with a surplus of fashionable references, those without which no one presently dares enter a gallery for fear of having to look. The mystery of viewing has been one of his obsessions, since the art of cognition and wisdom, of construction and serenity to which he continually aspires, burgeons within him from the pristine resources of his millennial craft: the challenge of reality as a symbol, as a mythical substance that must be transposed into a humble and enigmatic surface that looks at the world and allows the world to look back. There are no isms here, no concepts, no anecdotes, and no cult of the day, no ludicrous values, and no technological dexterity. Above all, there is neither the lack of faith nor its implacable consequence: the irony that corrodes all of contemporary art.
The artist works seriously in an intensely semantic art with which he constructs a wisdom external to the work yet ostensible within it: a private icon that can be shared; a study of the divine realities in man as inalienable structure and as permanent energy. Perhaps this is what anthropological painting was looking for: an anthropofany, the plenitude of the sacred signs of man, not simply from their external or purely historical manifestations, or even as information or nostalgia, but as an accumulated and dynamic investigation procured and culminated joyfully today, now. His incorporations of both Eastern and Western cultures do not act as simple quotations: they are the stone and mortar of the temple. His basic compositional recourse, the mandala, is employed as an internal experience that guides his eagerness for a grave and centered art; an art that is tranquil and greater than the world and that is capable of taking us to its transcendental heart. This artisan dares to organize himself around an elemental procedure having a will of relinquishment equivalent to the certainty of grace. His successive series The Sacred Mountain, The Awakened Stone, The Vertical Gaze have erected an autonomous pictorial realm, patiently awaiting blessed and grateful eyes. There is a need to look, to be looked at, and to look again.
This current group of works represents the culmination of these introspections. The icon breaks free from the painting and the wall to insinuate directly the ritual object that, in its own spatial condition, evokes the temple and shapes it. In opposition to the gothic ogive, the painting hangs; it obeys gravity; it accepts that tension between high and low is defined in favor of the sacredness of the second. Yet it only accepts this to ascend suddenly, with a telluric ebullience, towards a coronation above, where paradigmatic man gloriously offers himself, a suffering knot, irradiant of every version of reality. Binary sequences defined in this way object and space, high and low, water and fire, masculine and feminine, light and shadow animate the constancy of the very center of the mandala. At the same time, they conserve it and alight it to a hypnotic state, a visual delight. Every piece is a fervent prayer, a confession and a canticle of praise. All of the energies of the painter-supplicant meet in an instant of auspicious equilibrium, in a peace that emanates life and feeling endlessly. On the contrary, they may collide in a battle of self-development, of pain and effort projected as sacrifice where everything low is appropriated for the labor of spiritual baptism and ascension. Faced with this explosion of the deep implications of being, Mircea Eliade would have spoken of a Kratophany, the classic moment in every religious tradition in which the hierophany, the sacred manifestation, becomes present as a force. And yet, significantly, the series does not resolve in scandal there has been enough in more than a century of art but in a gentle harmony of questions and answers, a mirror of themes and solutions that rhyme, concord and dilate their suggestions in a sweet scale, properly human. That is, the locus of viewing in space turns into a space of viewing in the locus of being, with all of its tensions, its profane and sacred possibilities. That art is sacred, and the sacred is a party. That the world can be improved from within, from the primeval man invested in the powers of his Creator. That we are here to glorify, creating.
Rafael Almanza
Poet, writer, and art critic
Translation by: Gined Vitali-Ganem
Edited by: Aragorn Vitali
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