Dreams entail something true, although retaining them is an arduous task, as the painter Daniel Jordán demonstrates in his latest exhibition La Segunda Vista, which has been on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MIAC) of Lanzarote since the end of November 2023.
As the famous phrase by Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, reminds us, "in dreams we recognize our own self, despite the disguise of elevation or degradation with which it appears to us." This search that Daniel Jordán undertakes in the experience of dreams is nothing more than a sincere inquiry into himself and a new line in his work, after these last years where he had addressed the artistic context of Lanzarote in his work.
In La Segunda Vista, Daniel Jordán spent an intense year working in his grandparents' old house in a town in Valencia. The place where the works were made is important to understand their origin. The inspiration of an isolation in a rural environment, of some objects and a smell will lead to a surprising result.
Even the evocation of a smell can be relevant, as Daniel Jordán recalled from the scene in Sorrentino's film The Great Beauty, when one of the protagonists answers the childish question: What do you like most in life? with a memorable answer: "The smell of old people's houses." The character, of course, was doomed to a destiny of sensitivity, to be a writer. Should we heed these signs and interpret in them the signs of a destiny? Can it be a good idea to reflect on dreams?
In Teresa de Cofrentes, this place of family memory, Daniel Jordán wanted to do something new in his artistic career and started from a look inward, towards the depths of the unconscious world, the oneiric, the images of dreams to find a suggestive starting point. He was looking for signs in his exploration in the transit of consciousness and dream. With all the difficulties that we can find in this process due to the very evanescence of dreams, due to their inherent lack of information. As we all know from our experience, although they have a narrative character, it is usually difficult to understand what happens in dreams or, for example, to see a face clearly.
The successive layers of oil, the rectifications in the paintings show us the difficult transfer of the representation of the dream to the canvas. Dreams fade, they do not follow the parameters of the real world. When you try to remember dreams, just when you wake up you lose the details, some sensations remain. Sensations that when taken to the paper of a sketch lose a little their meaning as also the words lose when trying to describe them. Instinctively Daniel Jordán had to reconstruct the dreams, looking for a balance in the perception of the sensitive rather than in a defined image properly. Did he work then completely lost?
Not at all. He built his own method to carry out his purpose. The work process that he carried out to make the paintings that make up the exhibition was as follows: 1st) try to collect the image of dreams in annotations and sketches upon awakening, 2nd) make a scenography from a series of materials. It was about reconstructing with objects that were in his grandparents' house and things bought in Chinese bazaars a scenography that could capture, that could bring some solidity to the image of dreams. To establish that scenography, it was necessary to make decisions that, when taken to the painting, might need to be modified. 3rd) Paint that scenography, that is, transfer the recreated image of the dream from three dimensions to two.
A real challenge that is more narrative at the beginning to go later towards abstraction with the aim of returning to reality? What reality? A tombstone to which a character with a long tongue approaches. A werewolf inside a box facing the wall has his hands covered with gardening gloves tied to his back. A hare hides behind a flower cloth. A young deer with his face bandaged comes out of a table camilla and rests his snout sweetly on a brick wall. Two beings covered with bags of animal feed undertake a dance, hold their upper extremities and interweave their pink and extensive tongues. A strange biped with its winged torso and a mysterious beak uses its only hand to hold a key that could open the door or the bed that leads us to the dream or the nightmare.
The symbols overflow the suggestive dreamlike universe that is proposed to us. Perhaps one of the aspects that most attracts our attention is that most of the faces that he represents are covered even physically. Hybrid beings, beings that hide, that are in states ready to play, to dance, to dialogue with us. Characters that make you uncomfortable and that at the same time you can not stop looking at. Strange bugs. What to say about Daniel Jordán's weakness for strange bugs? The answer to this question would give for a book. Does the solitary task of the artist imply that he has to be or end up becoming a strange bug? Maybe yes. In a trunk with an eye and some skin? In a beast of the forest that covers its strange face with its hands? It is a possibility that the author proposes to us and that offers a meaning that we must discover for ourselves. If it turned out that the faces of the dreams are poorly defined, if it is necessary to find the balance between the human and animal aspect of some of the characters that appeared there, the artist sought his own way to reveal it with a curious sincerity.
In the middle of life, at forty years old one must gain in humility and can reach maturity. Creative maturity in this case. And if we consider all artistic creation as a tribute to human nature, in the words of the Russian poet Marina Tsvaetaieva in her work The Poet and Time, the only possible salvation would be to accept an order of conscience that is eternal, an assignment, an order of personal conscience that transcends time because it is outside of time.
Daniel Jordán seems to obey that order, who wants to offer in his exhibition, apparently conventional in contrast to the surprising and fun proposals to which he had accustomed us, a tribute to the secret nature of dreams, to the truest of ourselves. There is no doubt that the degree of self-awareness, artistic maturity and knowledge of his own self that the author reaches is very high, a timely search in the heroic act of solitude and an authentic creative lesson.
A phrase by Carl Jung, a disciple of Freud, can accompany us finally on the visit, can be finally useful in an interpretation of La Segunda Vista: "Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens." Perhaps, before anything else, we should look inside ourselves to better understand what is shown in this exhibition before our eyes.