Forest
Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, May 16 / June 13, 2020
Nature is a temple in which living pillars sometimes give voice to confused words;
man passes there through forests of symbols which look at him with understanding eyes.
Correspondences, Charles Baudelaire
Forest is a new series of paintings that explore the theme of landscape and its symbology. Forest represents an unexplored realm full of the unknown, it's a symbol of secrecy. It stands for the unconscious and its mysteries, a place where reality is left behind and the rules of the universe bend. The works present a network of spaces occupied by the juxtaposition of the familiar and the indefinable, the narrative and the abstract, creating an alternative world poetically tuned and dramatically heightened, a world which crystallized out of the perception of our present.
Siro’s work construct an image of the world that unites the fragmented experiences of our time. It is an image that is permeated by the utopia of an harmonic whole but where the wounds and fractures of human existencee and the desires and contradictions of our time remain, becoming tangible even. The work offers a place of meditative introspection, a space where one can contemplate beauty and mystery, erotic fantasies and innocent pleasures, memories and thoughts. Through paintings characterised by figures that no longer correspond to the names we gave them and which do not respect the traditional narrative, Siro creates an autonomous and personal language unknown, full of archaic and metaphorical meanings.
However intricate these very formal narratives, put in the language of contemporary art, might be, we always recognize images of landscapes and animals in which we find mirrored human beings, their bodies, their ideas, their experiences and utopias, images of their suffering and hopes, of their fables, myths and fairytales, of their dreams and nightmares. This language is presented not as clear images, but in the way memories often present themselves to us, as in a dream: veiled, without logic, incomplete and coloured by the moment, an inner sanctuary for both human and mythical beings, a place of allure, mystery and sublime delights.
Siro combines two apparently diametrically opposed poles of art in the 20th century, figuration and abstraction. In te poetic areas of his art the narrative richness of figurative representation marries the cool rigor of formal abstraction. The customary boundaries of art become blurred, even disappear completely in this work, wich neither knows nor admits any boundaries. The indeterminate spaces of his fictive and psychological worlds teem with hybrid bodies and objects, as if his eye was the chief witness of an agitated scene acted out by mysterious figures coming together in a disconcerting conflation of perspectives. Siro reduces figures to their essence and then adds and adopts biomorphic and surreal forms, transforming past and present into new realities, abstracted and controlled. Instead of an exact rendering, the viewer is presented with suggestions of real objects that are subjected to the artist's personal interpretation of their forms and meanings. These works are tales which resist description, where the identifiable jostles the indefinable, shapes and figures emerge and vanish between empty and filled spaces, enigmatic visions which necessarily remain open to each observer’s individual imagination. If the artist’s pictorial vocabulary has a code, this code is always shaken up by a mosaic of places, constructions and characters that render the image mysterious.
Siro says of his paintings that “ The paintings have the structure of narrative, but a structure that remains unknown, as if it were a construction whose production is the fruit of an enigma, of looming and fading forms and figures. When I start a painting, I don’t have a specific picture in my mind’s eye. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: it has to emerge as if inevitable.