HYBRID IDENTITY AND SOCIETY IN STARSKY BRINES
The powerful painting of Starsky Brines (Caracas, Venezuela, 1977) has in his most recent production the consolidation of one of the most intense expressions of the Latin American panorama. Collected under the accurate epigraph of Paisajes imposibles (Impossible Landscapes), the exhibition invites the spectator to let himself be impacted and submerged in a world as unreal and dreamlike as it is sometimes grotesque. These adjectives, more typical of the symptomatology of the society that underlies each of the Venezuelan's pictorial interpretations, seem to originate in the different angles that converge in Brines' universe.
Nevertheless, that imaginary that has been resizing reality portrays with equal importance the criticism and the possibility of hybridization as a symbol of that underlying and dormant nature within the human being and his relations with the environment. Figuratively, the artist proclaims a framework of encounter between landscape and nature, between community and society, between the different stereotypes that, even within that hybridization, share the limelight with certain pop winks that decorate the impact as well.
That double identity that, at least, guarantees the processes of surprising heterogeneity between animal and human is transferred with thick and powerful strokes, as if trying to demonstrate that atavism and almost primitivism in the execution and result, also part of that identification with the animal being and the relationship with the environment. The latter does not necessarily have to be concrete, despite the fact that the constant resources used allude more to an urban Latin American cosmos.
In fact, sometimes we travel through those areas that are unfeasible in principle, but which, both in execution and result, lead us to known contexts that seem to deform in a grotesque way. As a continuity solution to the tragic, Brines also proposes a certain healing humour, a more parodic approach that leads to a sarcasm that is sometimes necessary, but always fundamental in his work. This is an interesting point, since his thematic evolution, or at least his conceptual evolution, seems to have moved from a certain daily violence and unsustainable decadence to a somewhat friendlier and more playful environment.
This story that grows in its universe is as unreal as it is true, but it is incapable of separating that spectrum of unconsciousness as a factor to understand the reality of the proposal it offers to the spectator. Perhaps for this reason, the essence can be seen divided between the painter's own technique and the figurative, with all that he intends to reflect and that, in the end, despite its complexity, could be summarized in a catharsis. And that is the same one that confronts him, confronts us, with worlds that are not so distant, but invisible, through these alter egos that have the capacity to be cicerone and self-representation at the same time.
Paisajes imposibles can be seen until August 30 at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery, 20 Claudio Coello Street, Madrid, Spain.
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