… Creation lives as a genesis under the visible surface of the work.”
Paul Klee
In his first solo exhibition in Rome, the artist Gregory de la Haba, one of the most interesting on the New York scene, in this series of works defined as “Light Tensions”, specially composed for this occasion, establishes a relationship with life, evolving the way of seeing beyond aesthetic expression in a condition of fantastic privilege... And let's think of the words of Leonardo da Vinci: painting is a mental thing”; and we say to ourselves: here's one of advanced current affairs. What is painting without color and what is color without light? The light of day, the electric lights of the night, of neon. This bearer of an external gaze is concerned with including these visual tensions as protagonists of the process of the creative process. Thanks to digital and virtual technologies, he reconfigures the painting as a zone of truth and light. Its elements do not float on the canvas, they are incorporated into the texture and the material in an interactive dynamic. When the signs of the walls of NY are incorporated, these canvases seem to say “back to the future”. When they connect to comics and street art, we understand that for the artist there is no lesser art but only a superior vision. In his works the artist expresses the sense of a visual essentiality, only apparently confused, but structurally linked to the ironic and colorful vision of life. Expressing with his irrepressible sign a misleading gestural line, guided by a manual impetuosity, an identity full of emotional and cultural expressionism inserted in a solid reality. The structure of each work is therefore composed as the expression of a non-verbal thought, transformed into an articulated structure and consolidated in the revelation of reality. Where a stylistic exercise is gathered capable of transforming a desire, in the irony of creativity, in a dilation of time and space. Stains, quick marks, chromatic arrogance, dispute the definition of space, competing with nature and poetry in the restless search for formal solutions of the work. “Art is always organized around the void of the impossible and real thing (Lacan).
But once again he doesn't look outside, but inside. Inside its origins, inside its being, choosing the ideal gesture, the ideal form, between proportions to contradict, colors to exhibit, words to suggest and dreamlike signs to sublimate. In making art Gregory de la Haba does not make any concessions to style, to the needs of the spectator, but the tenacious and patient pursuit of the sign in search of the canvas expresses something that is there, that exists. In this way a poetic dimension arises in which space, movement, rhythm, light and vibration are elements referable to objective emotional spaces of a dream vision, in which, once again, the sign is never entrusted to pure instinct but to a creative and structured need. But once again he doesn't look outside, but inside. Inside its origins, inside its being, choosing the ideal gesture, the ideal form, between proportions to contradict, colors to exhibit, words to suggest and dreamlike signs to sublimate. In making art Gregory de la Haba does not make any concessions to style, to the needs of the spectator, but the tenacious and patient pursuit of the sign in search of the canvas expresses something that is there, that exists. In this way a poetic dimension arises in which space, movement, rhythm, light and vibration are elements referable to objective emotional spaces of a dream vision, in which, once again, the sign is never entrusted to pure instinct but to a creative and structured need.
In this phase of his work Gregory de la Haba wants us to believe that the stimulating and at the same time provocative idea of making art is to enter the anarchy of the absence of structure. But on the contrary, these works, full of light and colour, refer to a concrete vision of today's world, in which the artist is well aware of the assimilations that derive from the various cultural intersections encountered during his educational and creative journey. Meaning that in any case art, even today, always remains the only existential segment between human hope and poetry.
