COLIN BALDWIN
ARTIST
About Me
My first direct contact with art was through the work of Wayasamín, an artist I met in Quito where my parents moved when I was still a teenager. I learned to see the transcendence of Latin American painting, also thanks to the enthusiasm of my brother Carlos Tataje, a strict historian of pre-Columbian cultures, painter and art lover.
When I had to study at the university I decided to do it on my own. But I wasn't alone, I was lucky to meet Gerardo Chávez at his home in Trujillo. From Gerardo I received few instructions, but Master Chávez knew how to look at art with depth, knowledge and passion. When I showed him my drawings he arranged them before me, in a way that they did not look mine, then I could see what my ignorance concealed. He sent me to visit a sculptor friend of his, and he told me "Take everything as a form" conception that freed me from the dictatorship of the representation of realism and at the same time led me to understand the internal dynamics of the natural.
Some time later I met his brother Ángel Chávez and visited his workshops for a long time in the centre of old Lima, from whom I learned the mysteries of oil painting and his work of colour and and transparencies. Without a doubt he was very generous letting me see how he worked. It was the best master class I could receive.
Here in Spain, the design and layout of the poetry magazine Formas, forced me to consider the invisible, sustenance of language, as a seed of visible creation in art.
Today in practice, I look back and observe the drift of the original and wonder if that is a valid goal in art. The authentic is always original, but the unique is not always original or authentic.
My Peruvian and European roots make me reconsider that we share myths and archetypes with different cultures, and I do not think they are creative inventions that happen to coincide, but forms that arise from a collective imagery that seems to come to us from a parallel universe, dream factory or habitat of the divinity.
In the aesthetic labyrinth of each artist there is a way to manipulate matter and images to bring the viewer before a new paradigm, we delve into our cultural heritage and project our conclusions in the hope of perhaps inspiring other generations.
CRÍTICAS
Ángel Chávez, Insula Gallery (Lima)
A few days ago I had the opportunity to see some paintings that Colin Baldwin will exhibit at the Insula Gallery, this is his first individual show. I can say that I was very surprised by his painting, which has great human content and above all, is well treated:
each one of them in their true atmosphere: mostly oil paintings and colored drawings. Images and characters are treated with excellent subtlety, the fine coloring blends with prudence and accuracy. My preference is in the small formats where his composition fits better and where his hybrid inhabitants, objects, etc, etc; are distributed with accurate plastic intuition. Colin develops his work in the Huanchaco cove, he belongs to the new generation of Trujillo artists, but he is already shining with his own light; he has already gained prestige and some awards and honorable mentions in his young career with national collective exhibitions. His paintings are in private collections inside and outside the country, especially in Paris. It is an honor for me to present Colin Baldwin as a revelation in the painting of Peru on this occasion and I trust that in a not too distant future he will give us more than one surprise; thus reinforcing the genuine northern art and consequently reaching a preferential position in the national plastic arts scene.
Edoardo Spazzapan, London
I know the painter Baldwin through the images received here in London. In his well-presented dossier, I immediately discovered the soul of an artist distressed by solitude and great silences. It does not seem to me, yet, that within his painting, there can be appreciated an evident will to communicate. His images, the spaces of pictorial memory, the modern hieroglyphs, materialize in sensations that gravitate, rising, tilting, with disturbing tenderness, almost anthropological.
Thus, with Colin Baldwin's painting, a new theory of reflectionis born, with the imagination without which it is not possible to speak of a free modern realism, after the naturalism and dominant romanticism in the informalists. he rest of Baldwin's nature is diverse, and it seems to me that he is conquering happy and personal equidistances, in the line of a Tapies or a Saura. Certainly, I tell you that Baldwin, instead of reducing himself or limiting himself to a kind of balanced and closed, almost neometafisictensions, realizes and gains depth through the gesture; a gesture close to the soft, which breaks and reveals the contradictory of the definition that the artist has given here, of his effort as a painter, of his intrinsic work in the energy of painting and life: a job that seems deep and precise to me. The trajectory of this young man, who is a very sensitive and gifted painter, is worth following. And he knows that only with tremendous effort can he eventually abandon the post-informal experience, to reach new shores of fantasy, recovering the image in its full light.
In the mini-portrait, of singular charm, it is demonstrated that Baldwin's art merges into the depths of memory, where light and shadow reveal the eternal melody of alchemy: magic that delves into the unknown.
Before leaving the painter Baldwin, I want to add something about his philosophy of life. It seems to me that he now understands what his isolation has meant, and the hard price he has paid in his metamorphosis (Apart from time) in the certainty of accepting the purely external (it seems) myth of man. Baldwin has faced loneliness as a new human dimension and as a form of meditation. Western-Eastern world, capitalist-socialist; it is not that these words have lost all their meaning, as some Soviet concepts survive, as well as ambition, expansion, in an evident and mysterious way. Something persists that makes us work in the concrete world, filling it with contents that we ourselves are capable of feeling and of which we do not take advantage of the meanings in all their dimensions. Baldwin does not abstractly seek the meaning of things and yet he is impregnated with all of it; figures, gestures, stains that he arranges to bring us to the solemn encounter of preeminence, where the sense of the world and the things that involve us are presented in his works with a force and singularity that few achieve.
Román Pereiro Alonso, Santiago of Compostela
Among the latent lyricism of the painter Colin Baldwin, it's easy to find his interpretative keys. The lyricism reflects situations and events seen through an individual consciousness. None of the images that Colin offers us are empty of a protective feeling that emerges between the symbols and veils to which the artist has accustomed us.
The reading of this work is somewhat disturbing, but even more exciting! Emotion and feeling are two affective states that, rare it will be, do not provoke the necessary spark to produce the desired communication between the work and the viewer. This is the most important aspiration of every artist. Colin certainly achieves it.
Bituminous black, loaded with mournful essences, and trembling lights to imbue the magnificent black series "THE EARTH WILL BE GIVEN". An accurate reiteration of the problems of computer saturation and the urgent search for solutions. Upon discovering the utopianism of the mission, the character abandons it. In the center of space, the machine remains as a totemic symbol of salvation.
Carlos Tataje, Laxeiro Expo
I have seen scenes from a remote, distant world, lost in one of the infinite directions allowed in the time of the gods.
I have seen beings capable of transmitting all the knowledge of the wise and the saints, without uttering a single word, with the simple gaze of pure eyes.
I have seen those characters invested with a serene complacency, secretly proud of their huge hair, cared for with the sole carefree tranquility of months and years.
I have seen the solemn clothes that cover some presumably beautiful bodies, which do not hide from cold or modesty.
I have seen the landscapes that at dawn or at dusk present the lights, colors, and shadows that warn us of the silent pleasure of seeing and being visible.
I have seen some boards rescued from a dwelling hidden among trees, rain, and the winding path that leads to the peaceful regions of imaginary lakes. I have enjoyed the spectacle of some meticulous paintings.
I closed my eyes, and with them closed, I saw the possible mirage born in the persistent dreams of a human painter.
Luis Alcántara, Sargadelos Gallery
Colin is from another universe. He's on the other side of the mirror, like a god or an ant, in the transfer from dreams to this shore of ours where one dreams aloud lying on a couch with a psychiatrist as a witness.
When Colin looks, you know that if he were blind, he would still paint the same, that if color didn't exist, he would invent it, that if there were no music, he would make an exciting aria out of a heartbeat. When you get to know him, you realize that people like Colin are essential to avoid falling into the temptation of the mirror.
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