Dimitri Kosiré in the 21st century

 We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

Or of an océan not littered with wastage

T.S Eliot – The Dry Salvages

Dimitri Kosiré is a versatile visual artist, nomadic by nature and an inhabitant of a planetary universe. His cosmology is that of the demiurge who celebrates life and also that of those magicians, bringers into being of radiances that intoxicate both man and nature. Conjunction of suns and moons drawn from past and present lives, Kosiré is the populator of visual images coming from remote and ancient lands. He is inhabited by vast existential and creative limits which are manifested in a visual art that is imaginary but also earthbound. Ceramics,sculptures, paintings, installations, drawings, correspond to silent manifestations of the wounds of the Earth, like the most select offerings from those historical avant-gardes that have fed the history of universal art.

Elevated in their formal complexion, the works in this new-one-man exhibition by Kosiré are presented as witnesses to a 21st century that has begun without letting go of  the residues of the past, especially in the romantic présence that can be seen in the title of this great exhibition, both for its significance and content, entitled Earths and Other Rachmaninovs. Earth, passion and music inspired the great Russian composer Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov, one of the most influential pianists of the 20st century who, with his romantic rage for life and the planet, enthuses this visual artist in whose work the knowing conjunction of the various formal artist and extra-artistic personal elements can be intuited. In Dimitri, who has the same origins as Rachmaninov – Russian, exiled and also an inhabitant of various lands – the music of the composer moves him by being very impassioned.

It is worth mentioning the origins of a man-artist-creator who experiences, resides in, inhabits a space that, whatever the circumstances, is truly his, in the present and in the future, in the here and there but which, for him, is a generous and free place in which to create and carry out his work in the most profound freedom of spirit. He is a European and a Latin-American who belongs to the planetary universe through which he has constructed his individual self and, above-all, his artistic self. His whole work reflects this journey through the visual force it expresses and the originality with which it is presented to the viewer and to history. It is receptacle of the past and present projected into the future.

The artist speaks of the importance of his origins in his work. And this is only right. Because these origins are compiled in the two eras of a personal and collective history which results in a tomorrow made present at the moment of conception. These origins determine his inherent aesthetic interest embodied with his emotions and with nature. They are realities converted into memories which much later become works. These memories of Earth, of the universe, of nature, can be clearly seen in his ceramics, sculptures and paintings.

Dimitri Kosiré, in an associative process, constructs a visual language that is expressed through various media and techniques. The stability of his own visual ideas and proposals, both formal and conceptual, leads to a particular beauty of configured form that follows Baroque aesthetic in the accumulation of textures and thematic signs in accordance with the effects of an apparent indeterminacy of forms (or-in-forms), even in his sculptures, in spite of their almost minimalist abstract spatial structure. This indeterminacy defines a utilitarian relationship with beauty. To analyse it as a whole, the work presented in this exhibition, which brings together more than ten years of work, produced over a period from the start of the two-thousands to two thousand and sixteen, makes clear the various influences which, in the course of his development, have been turned into artistic experience according to the various countries in which he has lived and which have fed his passion for the creative task and the relationsation of his work.

The syntax of Kosiré’s work is one of total identification with the visual, technical and materials resources he uses. The iconographic exuberance of which he makes use, especially in his painting, articulates an ontological message which references human nature, while the sculpture, in its reading as simple drawings in space, as well as the three-dimensional volumes of the ceramics, are knowing references to the vegetal and animal universe. The talk of origins, a recurring theme in his work, is concerned with the meanings that emerge from the interior of each piece. For example, the series of paintings entitled The Cosmogonies corresponds to some extent to the origins of the universe, while in The Transpaintings, it corresponds with that of ecstasy in the Dionysian sense, and for Red Earths, to the personal origins, according to the artist’s own definitions. All these series are based on the same common conceptual core intrinsic to his aesthetic and visual principles. It is important to conceptualise the notion of beauty in the work of Kosiré. It could be said that it corresponds to his particular understanting of this principle which is inherent in any work of art. In this case, certain metaphysical connotations cause expectancy in the viewer’s perceptual awareness, thus it is not a conventional or classical beauty.

Some common characteristics can be seen throughout the series of paintings in this show, especially in those titled Transpaintings. The most general of these characteristics makes reference to a certain expressionist quality tempered with sharp  and high-temperature colours, undoubtedly the most Baroque expression in comparison to the sculpture and ceramics. Many meanings are accumulated here which visually show the multiple origins that obsess the artist. It would seem that Kosiré abandons his black, white and ochre palette and respect for the materials used in previous work heavy with textures in accordance with the high visible relief which, as articulations of art povera, hang from the surface of the medium. In the pictures that have already been defined as pictorially expressionist, as in previous works, this presents an interior universe projected retrospectively from memories, recollections and experiences that have distinguished the creative processes of this artist from the various sources of the historical avant-gardes. Convoluted memory is manifested in figurative signs evoked and schematised through their essentiality. In these configurations can be found faces, traces of vegetation, stains that refer to aqueous formations that seem to slide over the media surface. But above all they are forms of a totality that refers to an abstract landscape.   

Like the paintings, the series of sculptures that Dimitri presents here can be analysed in the same way. As abstract freehand drawings in space, they resemble the morphological outline of an insect. Black in colour, the iron bars are welded so that they seem to be in constant motion. Defying the space, they are placed, like aerial supports, above some of their bars and avoiding symmetry, they are built into a complex structure that oscillates between abstraction and figurative reference characteristic of European and American modernist iron Sculpture. In hierarchical order, the iron bars ascend from the lower part formed by the play of the various suggested spatial lines, until they rise and finish in a single one of these, almost totemic in size and posture which looks towards the infinité. A phenomenical approach would be connected with the original position of the insect in nature.

On the other hand, the ceramics, in their actual volume, are totally different to the series of spatial sculptures, free of volume. Clay/earth is the material that the artist pays tribute to with these strange pieces, malformed in their shape and in the cracks that open up into an inner world that seem to keep an essential secret in nature. But the other work, which Kosiré also defined as ceramics, is evidence of the chromatic expressionism characteristic of his painting. Respectful of the material, something important for the artist, the piece seem to have endured the rigors of time given their thousand-year-old rusty patina, here he comes closer to ceramics that were once admired in universal archaic cultures.

The novelty of the work of Dimitri Kosiré in general is maintained according to the material he uses. For each one of these, both their aesthetic as well as their formal values change. He creates a work of art, wether painting, colage, ceramic or sculpture, outside of the conventional rules of art. Thus he responds to his internal needs as a creator immersed in a universe of his own where the inspirational sources, rooted in what he himself defined as his origins, are respected. They belong to the play of images inscribed on stone, on canvas, wood, ceramics or made as free-hand drawings in space. Three-dimensional or not, these works respond to an artistic activity appropriate for the contemporaneity of art.

The artist imposes his creative limits according to the certitude of making a purely mental record that is subsequently translated into an artistic reality, that is to say, an object of art.

Belgica Rodriguez

Caracas, April 2016