“I paint with natural light, a light that shifts and changes. My pictorial oeuvre does it too: it transforms itself in front of those who contemplate it.
I started a long time ago from the white, the awakening of the light, the colour, to achieve the immaterial. At the beginning I rejected the material, I stayed motionless in front of the screen and, as time went by, I realised that there is no greater satisfaction in the result than painting with paint and its thickness. Paint always gives both security and confidence, in every sense. Painting is a physical act, a battle against the material in a support that must be transformed for the images to emerge naturally. It is like building a skin on top of the canvas framework.
As working time passed, colour and synthesised forms appeared in my works. However, my intention was for the paintings to be as ethereal as forgetfulness. So, I started to discover that changes in my perception of the paintings and in the chromatic intensity emerged; there was life in the artworks while I observed them.
Light and colour from the inside of the painting moved on the retina with immateriality or evanescence. I saw this sensation sometimes, when I arrived at the untidy studio and perceived that my finished artworks had changed in such a way to seem as if I was seeing them for the very first time. Sometimes, I didn’t recognise some of my paintings at the gallery, as if they had dressed up for the occasion. My brain needed to understand again, the pieces of art demanded I stop in front of them so they could show themselves to me.
These paintings I’m presenting demand spectators stop and contemplate them, and it’s then when the changes needed to perceive them occur in their brains.
I work with bright colours in expansion, with the same colour range; colours that are generally warm and without limits, lines, brushstrokes, or gestures. Diffuse extensions that make colour float in spaces that seem white but are not. Colours are nourished by the spectators' gaze, which discovers non-existent nuances, or ones that are hidden and come out to meet them, as if the spectators completed the artwork. We can describe them as living paintings; they aren’t frozen in time, like a gesture, a short or long brushstroke that ends somewhere in the painting, or a static, abstract or figurative representation.
On the other hand, there is the drawing. For me, it’s a fundamental tool: drawing is in the mind, in the way of looking of the days, in the papers, in the notebooks, in the books that serve me as painterly brushstroke exercises, an obsession to avoid losing manual dexterity, playfulness and surprise, or to research for possible changes in the representation. I draw everyday with my gaze and my hand, with the twist of my wrist, via everyday life.
I use the curved line, and it gives me back vivid images. I observe the winter branch, the path it draws, the horizon and the wave, the cloud and the tree, the animals or the human body. I surprise myself in the cooking routine when peeling a clove of garlic, an onion, a potato… or when cooking an egg. My brain recognises serendipitous shapes or profiles that bring me back to drawing and I record them via photography.
A constant feature in my life is forgetfulness and the uncertainty it provokes. With the work Mitad de la Memoria [Half of the Memory], I wanted to reflect this idea. An obsessive and ongoing piece that I present via twenty-one volumes of an encyclopaedia. A compendium of knowledge and collective memory in which I erased part of the information via my language, changing prosaic information for another ethereal kind related to space, forgetfulness, and future uncertainty. In some pages, the human being appears as a trace or a passenger of memory.
Besides the pictorial work, there are also papers and drawings, and other books of exercises of memory and forgetfulness, synthesis, and freedom, forever in process throughout all these years.”
Din Matamoro