World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 478 - Enrique Collar

World Fine Art Professionals and their Key-Pieces, 478 – Enrique Collar
On the wall of the back room of the WM Gallery hangs a large painting or rather film still of a family in mourning. In the front vases with flowers in front of a coffin that is not visible. In the center a woman with a rosary, next to her four other women, younger and older, one of whom wears a black veil. Behind them other family members – men and women, even in the doorway.
Many of the paintings, duo-chrome on metal, in the exhibition ‘Stills: Volume II’ appear to be related to this total scene. They are cinematic paintings in dark tones with two dominant colours.

Diptych Novena and Costa Dulce
The creator, Enrique Collar, was happy to give us some explanation. He is originally from Paraguay, studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano in Argentina and has been living in the Netherlands for about 20 years, in Rotterdam. The paintings come from his second and third films, Novena and Costa Dulce.

Enrique: “These films are part of my Paraguayan trilogy, together with my debut film Miramenometokéi. Novena and Costa Dulce can be considered a diptych. They were shot in Itauguá and its surroundings. Itauguá is my city, where I was born and lived until I was six years old, my family comes from there. It is my main source of inspiration for my Paraguayan/Latin American work.”

Different visual languages
In the exhibition we see film images translated into painting. Enrique Collar is concerned with his perception of space, which is based on the view through a lens. As the French filmmaker Robert Bresson put it in his Notes on the Cinematograph.
Enrique: “Cinema is something virtual, it needs electricity, a room or a screen, a projector and an audience. First there were images in my mind, then came the sketches on paper, the filming, the editing, the international festivals where the films toured, and now they are static images, something physical, matter.”
Enrique Collar mixes different (visual) languages, so to speak. “I question the appearance of an image. I find that fascinating. It is a form of trompe l’oeil, optical illusion. Many people think that these paintings are photographs, or engravings, lithographs, or even daguerreotypes. I find that very amusing.”

Rembrandt’s drawings
At the beginning of his career as an artist, he drew a lot. “Rembrandt was a source of inspiration. I had seen his landscape sketches and street figures and that fascinated me. The ease with which he draws a line and how he brings a live drawing to something alive with only lines, without light and shadow, the line in its purest form.”

Later, photography and video also became part of his work and little by little he stopped drawing. “A few years ago I wanted to take up drawing again, but not with lines, but with tones, shades of gray and black, like Seurat did with his beautiful drawings. I also didn’t want to use pencil or charcoal or other traditional media, and that’s how ‘drawing with oil tones’ came about and using another medium: metal. I had been working on another project, Pigments, and I added it to Stills, and that was it.”

Two layers of paint
He starts with a first layer of dark paint and then a second layer of almost transparent colored oil paint. “That’s how it is at the moment. I know I can develop it further, but I don’t know how far. I already have several alternative projects in mind with this technique.”
In a somewhat more distant future, he thinks of translating film stills into large-format paintings on canvas. “I think this format is closer to cinema, because of the physicality and confrontation with the viewer. On the other hand, small metal works that I am showing now are closer to the mobile phone and the tablet.”

Art History
For Enrique, art history is not just a source of knowledge, it is a real passion, he says. “You have to see it in its entirety. My understanding of painting and its history is not linear. When I was an art student, I heard in theory lessons that the father of modernism was Paul Cézanne, for me Pieter Brueghel was a genius in the field of spatial insight. I continued to believe in that, and today, after so many years of painting, I think my intuition was not so wrong. Our brain and art history are the inexhaustible sources.”

His first major solo exhibition was in Asunción, Paraguay in 1990. “I showed everything I had painted the year before after finishing the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano in Buenos Aires.” That exhibition was a resounding success. From then on, he had an exhibition every year, for more than ten years in a row. When everything was going perfectly, he decided to make things a bit more complicated for himself: he started making films!

Total approach
“Writing, directing and producing three feature films in Paraguay has helped save my painting. It is now linked to other contemporary experiences, and to the digital age. In this way I have built a total approach with a classical background and a modern, contemporary perspective.”
Images
1) Stills #19 – Prayer | oil on canvas 110×200 cm, 2023/24 | Private collection, 2) Stills #26, 3) Stills #27, 4) Stills #28, 5) Stills #32, 6) Photo artist, 7 – 10 ) Opening exhibition.

 

https://collarenrique.com/
https://www.instagram.com/collar.enrique/
https://gallerywm.com/WP/
https://inzaken.eu/2024/06/14/enrique-collar-mixt-verschillende-beeldtalen/