Dis Berlin, an enigma in vivid colors

Madrid,

Just over a year after presenting his recent works in “Labyrinth of Solitudes” at the Sala Parés in Barcelona, an exhibition focused on the pictorial options of constructing enigmas from games of dualities, between concepts such as silence and music or absence and presence, Dis Berlin returns to the scene (and to another of its usual galleries, the Madrid-based Guillermo de Osma).

In fact, the exploration of combinations of discordant notions is a common note to most of the production of this artist from Soria, originally called Mariano Carrera (he adopted that nickname of Dis Berlin from a Roxy Music song). The sacred and the profane, the earthly and the ethereal, the sensual and the spiritual float in his compositions, in which he gives objects voluptuous qualities, clouds and flowers suggest a certain carnality and the lights seem to contain the promise of revelations that the spectator will have to intuit.

Formally, we can see in his pieces resources linked to collage and photomontage, not so much as techniques but as concepts that allow the approximation between what is dreamed and what is real; It is possible to connect some of his works with the hidden messages that proliferate in certain images of Picabia, with Hausmann’s machine men, the irony of Hannah Höch or Man Ray’s devotion to mystery. In the service of an enigma that considers both path and outcome, Berlin deploys multiple plastic, musical, cinematic, literary, conceptual and object references in close conjunction, composing puzzles with which it tries to challenge what is routine in everyday life: another existence, now unknown, can be evoked for him.

His new proposal at Guillermo de Osma, open until the end of January 2025, is called “There are many songs left in my heart” and consists of forty works between landscapes and interiors inhabited by objects; Human figures rarely appear in them and, when they do, the artist’s treatment of them does not differ much from that of these other elements. From the common room of each other, apparently random by bringing together pieces of very different functions and shapes, some ancient and others modern, both intrigue and humor are born; Since communication between objects is impossible, his scenes are dominated by silence, which in this case, by the author’s intention, acts as a counterpoint to the empty noise that would characterize our time and as an invitation to meditation and stillness.

These environments, which due to this silence and their frequent openness to natures with open horizons have been linked to metaphysical compositions, have been traced with formal precision and respond to a defined aesthetic and thematic program: Berlin loves poetry and play, but nothing in its production, no detail, responds to improvisation or chance, but rather to meticulous study.

Dis Berlin. Close. Armchair for TS Bonivell, 2024

It has been this way since this artist immersed himself, in the eighties, in the so-called Madrid figuration from that time and Pedro Almodóvar contributed to its popularization, who has featured his paintings in quite a few of his films since that moment, starting with Tie me up! (1990) and ending with the most recent The next room (2024). The Guillermo de Osma Gallery itself has accompanied him throughout much of his journey: his first exhibition there took place in 1999 and the current one is his fifth presentation at the firm.

Although most of his work is pictorial, he has also used techniques such as drawing, collage, sculpture, photography, photomontage and ceramics, combining his role as an artist with gallery work, curating and publishing. And the personal world that he reveals in his works has been enriched over the decades, but he has not lost his characteristic language, based on a vibrant chromaticism that can evoke that of magical realism, technical thoroughness and the absence of motifs. and easily recognizable locations (that do not have clear artistic references, as we saw).

Berlin has an extensive archive of images, mostly dated in the 1940s and 1950s, and draws on its own images, in which it works with layers of paint executed between time lapses carefully designed to allow the oil painting to rest and analyze. how colors settle and evolve, in the same way that it has attended to the metamorphosis of forms. This way the artist can investigate the possible chromatic transformations that would alter the final result: in addition to Fauvism, he has delved into the color theories developed by the Nabis and the first avant-garde.