Realist and visionary
Velasco’s inspiration has grown through the years over a note of pure, violent elation barely mitigated by the desire to control the image, to enclose it in some way, to enclose it in some way, to summarily grasp its features, to identify its confines, a profile.
Every time this impatient focalizer of lands and figures in continuous ecstatic gestation, has before him a permanently stormy, disturbed world, subjected to a sort of predominance of the big. Flayed, you could say, like Marsia’s body. Because Velasco chooses a subject and he is immediately overcome by it, and then, literally, he attacks it as if to see whether it will bleed, if in struggling it becomes real, incurably existing. Almost as though painting never means peacefully contemplating, ceasing to live, but acting and thereby, seeing more, more things and details and lines of energy than the eye usually can.
This summer ha was dazzled by the dramatic beauty of the Sicilian landscapes. Even in the bright sunshine he perceived their dark, intrusive physicalness. He looked at them attentively, exhausting them, while they solemnly appear and disappear, and are cauterized like shining wounds in the earth.
The more we look at Velasco, the more we observe his works, the more we glimpse in him the dual condition of realist and visionary. He is one of the least neutral, least passive of artists that I know. He does not make a gesture that is not exerted against the opacity, the inertia of life as it is. From his paintings we gather such a feeling of dilation, of overwhelming courage filled with risks, even on the verge between success and few setbacks suffered, which causes us to say that he has character, such as we would seek, if it were a question of literature, only in a marker of inflamed verses, or invective.
Every time this impatient focalizer of lands and figures in continuous ecstatic gestation, has before him a permanently stormy, disturbed world, subjected to a sort of predominance of the big. Flayed, you could say, like Marsia’s body. Because Velasco chooses a subject and he is immediately overcome by it, and then, literally, he attacks it as if to see whether it will bleed, if in struggling it becomes real, incurably existing. Almost as though painting never means peacefully contemplating, ceasing to live, but acting and thereby, seeing more, more things and details and lines of energy than the eye usually can.
This summer ha was dazzled by the dramatic beauty of the Sicilian landscapes. Even in the bright sunshine he perceived their dark, intrusive physicalness. He looked at them attentively, exhausting them, while they solemnly appear and disappear, and are cauterized like shining wounds in the earth.
The more we look at Velasco, the more we observe his works, the more we glimpse in him the dual condition of realist and visionary. He is one of the least neutral, least passive of artists that I know. He does not make a gesture that is not exerted against the opacity, the inertia of life as it is. From his paintings we gather such a feeling of dilation, of overwhelming courage filled with risks, even on the verge between success and few setbacks suffered, which causes us to say that he has character, such as we would seek, if it were a question of literature, only in a marker of inflamed verses, or invective.