Article in Artelogie about "Archaeology of Color", solo exhibition by David Beltrán
October 15, 2021
Suset Sánchez Sánchez has written an article, published in Artelogie, dedicated to David Beltrán's solo exhibition Archaeology of Color, which took place at Freijo Gallery between June and August 2020.
"David Beltrán's latest solo exhibition at Freijo Gallery in Madrid has become an exceptional poetic compendium that traces the itinerary followed by the artist during almost two decades of research into the art and techniques of painting as a language and means of representation par excellence in the history of Western art. And it is precisely the gesture of distraction established by this exhibition that leads us to an understanding of Art History, and specifically of painting, that goes against the grain of the canonical narratives established by historiography. This other history or bastard story, if you like, apocryphal, leads us to think that pictorial imageries are constructed on the basis of the possibility of the existence of their materials and the socio-economic and historical complex that has made them accessible in certain contexts of creation and in the hands of certain artists. So, this is a history where science, alchemy, geology, botany, political economy and above all, the expansionist and imperialist enterprise in the modern/colonial world system, weave the memory of images."
"Archaeology of Color is a rupture in the history of painting, a gap that allows the eye to locate the pictorial matter to reveal what has remained hidden under the first impression and fascination that the represented thing exerts on the spectator. It is not in vain that the artist uses the evocative semantics of the archaeological method to allude to his intervention in the time of the images, in their past, this accumulation of traces sedimented over centuries of over-exposure to the gaze that barely flutters on the surface of the painting. Whether he is aware of it or not, the fissure that is resized in these "hyperreal abstractions" - however paradoxical this binomial may seem - by David Beltrán, gives an account through his synthetic procedure of the geopolitics of the images, of their social-historical conditioning".