Primo Jim Tanya Huntington Hyde - Literal

Luis Gal
Water Clock
Adolfo Castañón / Juan Villoro
Translated to English by Adolfo Castañón
FOR LUIS GAL
What is the ear of the eye?
What is the feeling of seeing?
The sigh of color?
In the forest of roots
They weave together like bodies
That love and un-love,
Like truffl es entangled
In the roots of the drawing.
A. C.
n
Luis Gal, known for his exceptional pictorial explorations of the human body, now turns his attention to the landscape. In
his nudes, skin is expressed in all the grays that lie between white and black. His fi gures have a nocturnal quality, succumbing to lethargy
or awakening suddenly from sleep. The portraitist occupies himself with a subject matter that is at the same time alive and vulnerable; he
celebrates forms—the triumph of blood and its invisible wanderings—but he also records the corrosive passage of the hours. Made from time,
Gal’s bodies reveal the wounded, fl eeting nature of beauty.
Something similar can be seen in his recent appropriation of the landscape. The painter penetrates the overgrowth and the lagoons as
if entering an organism. His perspective does not come from afar; it seems to have been there forever. He pursues not the grand vistas that
seduce the excursionist, but the intimate portrait of one for whom the eye is an extension of the touch: he feels out leaves, grains of sand,
crests of foam.
Gal prefers uncertain hours, the times when daylight weakens but has not yet given way to night. On this shadowy border, he discovers
glimmers on the surface of the water, news from an indecisive world, which speaks with the uncertainty of the fi rst day. In light as well, he opts
for a chromatic ambiguity. In Gal’s noon, water dissipates into the sky. A dazzling, liquid blaze: his blue contains all colors.
These landscapes are an experience of space, but also of time. A waterfall plunges to measure the vertical lives of trees, the water captures
fugitive brilliance, the silent wake of stars.
With uncanny fl uidity, Gal has moved from the body to landscape. Or more accurately: he has made the landscape into a body. A secretive
stroke disturbs the still water. From the depths of that skin, the sea breathes. J. V.
50 4 LITERAL. LATIN AMERICAN VOICES FALL, 2008