Luminous Shadows of Manuel Vilariño

Fernando Castro Flórez, curator of the exhibition

Birds, beaches, mountains, ice, twilights and waves, the "abyssal sea", in a beautiful verse by Gamoneda, and the foggy rhinoceros, the owl and the words that starkly allude to an absence. The horizon of shocking purity in Manuel Vilariño's photographs makes us face an aesthetic of incomparable poetic beauty, demanding and subtle, true and, therefore, gloomy. Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego notices that the work of Vilariño is shown to us with a "paradoxical serenity", with a tension between a near outside and an interior distance, which requires "a calm gesture", a calm luminosity. Vilariño's photographs bring us back to earth. We have to assume the conflict of the work of art, that is, the relationship between world and earth. Only by crossing the twilight of the places can we return to the mountains and the forest, to the place that, even in the dark, teaches us something. It is there, in that area of the unknown, where art seeks its subject or, better, where obsessions take root. One must learn from the growth of things in nature and get to decide when is the right time. By chance chronological and meteorological time tells us of anything but a mixture, that is, of the kairós, or which is propitious. The light that makes things visible imposes the time of nature: there the cut and the continuity, the static and the fluid come together. Although photography is the faithful evocative testimony of reality, a means to remember, it also has a singular sentimental charge, in which it goes from happiness to tragedy, that is, in Barthes' terms, it is a reduplication of what has been but also a theater of death. Vilariño's tragic wisdom touches us by specifying the sacrifice, by beautifully illuminating finitude.

Manuel Vilariño’s song of existence is an intense and risky dwelling in the open; trying to reach the origin of the origin, the aión, the photographer enchants us with his nests of spices, with his binds and his shattered paradises. Rilke points out, in his Duino Elegies, that all the eyes of humanness are directed towards the open. Only our eyes, turned upside down, like a circle of traps, block all exits. We do not know what is beyond the circle "except through the eyes of the animals." That is what Vilariño seeks in his Involuntary Beasts, his eyes fixed on the distance: to aspire to that borderless, limpid existence. The most risky are those who want more; singing is belonging to the totality of pure perception. The photographer has felt the force of the wind from the unprecedented center of pure nature, without having to enter into the clearing.

Our trips may not have any purpose and we wander to get to nowhere or just to reach the sunset. We live between the hunt and the game of hide and seek, we want the prey even though in the end what appears is only the shadow. We are inevitably thrown into existence between the hole and the shadow. The photographer depicts dark animals, some of which he describes as “insomniacs”, icebergs illuminated with ice indicating a foreboding blackness, mountains which both enchant and disturb us.

Manuel Vilariño is a great master of still life, characterized by great poetic intensity. An "ambush" who comes over and over again, archetype of the shadow. Vilariño has created in recent years some fascinating compositions in which the artist essentializes the classical technique by using elements such as a candle, fruits or hanging birds.

In a very bare setting we witness not so much the apotheosis of mourning, but a chromatic display; Vilariño highlights the colors of the dead animals, intensifies the texture of the food while the omnipresent flame of the candle seems to enter a dreamlike dimension. To some extent, this artist is materializing what remains of the folds of the dream: a butterfly on an open missal, some rotten lemons, a beetle that seems to climb on the vanishing wax. Further than literalism, Vilariño produces an extraordinary game of variations in which he does not precisely drown out the fantasy of flight but rather invites the viewer to enter images that deserve the qualification of "generous." Vilariño's work –an immense still life–, enforces an enigmatic inner light. The artist’s intention is to let the animal or better, the earthly, be. By doing so, he keeps the world open. What remains in our epilogal era, what makes mankind happy, can be eroticism again, laughter or joy at the time of death An open-wide-naked eyes photographer awaits, then composes ritual scenes to give space to what is properly invisible. Vilariño's beautiful journey to a north that is radical outside has something of an Orphic journey, of a “dark shudder” in pursuit of the beloved shadow.

If Manuel Vilariño evokes loneliness, silence or death, his work also reveals traces of tenderness, the enjoyment of playing and the happiness of the encounter that the trip provides. In one of his texts he points out: beyond an apparent reality, the gaze of the vertigo of an instant germinates “in the forest of shadows.” He is capable of generating images that are, at the same time, dramatic and capable of transmitting the intensity of life, moving between lightness and darkness, dawn and twilight. This photographer who has the soul of a poet knows that the work of art is a questioning which does not long for a definitive answer.

LBeauty occurs almost accidentally. Vilariño speaks of a nostalgia for beauty that forces him to stay in the vicinity of death, in a rare dimension of happiness that arises from a nihilistic background, in the certainty of finitude. “The remains of animals –he writes with enormous lucidity–, their bones, strangle my thought, they set me apart from my thoughts and recognized boundaries. The horizon becomes active subconscious, or labyrinth, the desires. Automatism and chance work in an unexplored background. May the crucial be where the remainings are, in the poetic residue. Once again, remembering Celan, “speaks true who speaks shadow”.