ADRIANA CANTORAL
Peñalta. Anachronism in Stone.
Although Peñalta's work evokes the configuration of the petrified unconscious of the first artists of the Paleolithic era, his work can also be understood as an anthropo-zoomorphic archaeology in the wrinkled skin of rocks. Furthermore, his creations possess multiple readings and theoretical approaches. One of them is the analogy between Plato's myth of the cave and his marble art. On the one hand, the Greek philosopher sought to symbolically illustrate authentic knowledge, that is, ideas through the natural light of reason. On the other hand, our creator acts as a philosopher-artist on rocky surfaces, as he initially conceives forms and figures, not entirely clear, similar to how Platonic men saw dark silhouettes at the back of the cave. Only those who turned to the outside illuminated by the intellectual accessed reality, and thus the author carefully observes the material, in this case onyx or quartzite, and with his imagination and reasoning delves into the realm of the intelligible. Therefore, the beings he paints are liberated, as he claims, from the darkness, from the cavernous shadows. His pieces are unveiled Platonic ideas, exposed to luminosity, and previously contained and petrified. Is it a coincidence that both the protagonists of the story and those of the painter come, in one way or another, from the stone? Apparently not. The creator intellectualizes, materializes, and animates the petrum; Plato intellectualizes it so that human intelligence reflects on materializing and animating it. So how does he manage to reach the real? By outlining, delineating, and coloring, as closely as possible to its mineral nature. And here begins the other focus of his painting, the hermeneutical one. According to Gadamer, art is the peculiar expression of a truth that by no means corresponds to what the author had thought. This means that the work has autonomy beyond the author and that there is an unconscious creation by the artist. For the German thinker, the work of art is a kind of text open to countless interpretations. It, by itself, lacks space-time limitations and therefore, the painter chooses an anachronistic medium that literally arises from any earthly place and any time. The creator frees some characters from geological accidents, but others free themselves through their art. In this way, Peñalta formulates a petrous hermeneutic, since he translates and deciphers a past language, specific to the earth, with his drawings, patterns, veins, irregularities, and colors, into another intelligible and sensible for humans. It is about making art in its fullest splendor. We could affirm that he glimpses the essence of hidden images as if it were a first reading of the stone and then, he rereads them repeatedly to turn them into an aesthetic dialectic. In conclusion, the work of art surpasses reality and the expectations of the author's mind because it is an end in itself from the remote past to the present.
March 24, 2018.