DIMITRI KOSIRÉ. ORDER AND CHAOS OF AN ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION by Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda
Dimitri Koosiré is a French artist, a descendant of Ukrainian and Crimean emigrants who settled in Paris during the first half of the 1920s and then moved to Paraguay, South America, where his mother was born. Born in Paris in 1968, he displayed a vocation for knowledge and fine arts, as well as a keen interest in the balance of social forces. Polyglot, trained actor, lover of universal literature, scholar of visual arts – his life has been a series of transcultural experiences. His multiple references in history of art have bestowed upon him an ample range of formal and conceptual investigations.
His passion for abstract painting allows us to witness a discourse of what is experimental, formalist, autonomous, born from the spirit; emotions, daily and transcendental experiences – however, he dos not reject conceptual requirements and binarism. On one hand, purist research, variations of composition and materiality, intentions to find meaning through usage of the title as a verbal complement of the image; visual resources related to the special, textured reliefs and lyric atmospheres of expressionist impression. On the other hand, a social advocacy, where formal and communicative learning unfolds according to present requirements and needs and the context of reception.
As an artist of a 21st century which is a combination and synthesis of stylistic findings, he takes into account elements that conform to that long process in which historic abstraction took in techniques and visual representations that do not represent reality, while transgressing his own limits; for when creating in a non-representative manner, it became a language, a code and a new way to represent reality.
Kosiré dilated that process in which photography became a last chink into mimesis; the very instant when impressionist concentrated on the light and Picasso and Braque broke unitarian reality apart; power, like fauvists, hyerarchisation of colour and emotions; as Kandinsky and the Russian avantgarde, he claims that shape and colour sufficed to create imaginaries and that surrealism took over as supra-reality. From Mondrian, Rothko and optic and kinetic art he inherited different ways to understand geometry and perception of movement. In Pollock he found a dripping language that imitates surrealist automatism and dadaism. Moreover, Nouveau Réalisme, together with material abstraction – which seem contradictory – contributed to his work and the great neoexpressionist painting; the trans-avantgarde and new figuration became his accomplices in terms of format and expressive force.
So his work develops as a meeting point for pairs, in this case of alter-modern and postmodern discourse, which means an affirmation and critical transcendence towards the great stylistic and philosophical modernity. His work assimilates, deconstructs and enrichens previously established conventions to create a new abstraction. Expressing feelings, concepts and experiences becomes part of a creative process in which the subject constantly creates, liberates emotions and pictorial resources.
Between 2005 and 2016 he created highly experimental works as part of the series and exhibitions Cosmogonías (2004-2006), Transpainting (2005-2008), Una retrospectiva anticipada (2012) and Tierras y otras Rashmaninovas (2014-2016), which placed him around the tellurian force of the material, and the constitutive materiality of the pictorial. Within these, works such as Inks y Metalics, 2006-2014; Paisajes internos, 2012-2013; Moonlights echos, 2013; Tierra Roja, 2013-2014; Monocroms y Acumulaciones, 2014 invoked different levels of environmental contextualisation and our place in the universe, holding its positioning both at a micro and a macro existential level.
However, the privilege of individuality was put to a test during his constant wandering, absorbing from each land, each culture and experience, the matter to create. It is hardly surprising then that eventually his abstract, lyric, expressionistic tendency turns into conceptual and installation art, when reality so requires, when beyond his individual experience he wishes to talk to us as a man of his time, spectator, receiver and observer of what happens. While his abstract, matter painting includes fragments of reality as in reflecting spatiality, textures and sensations; on those journeys, reality imposed itself on him to talk to us in a more problematic, political manner, wherever one gets involved in empathy and representation of others. That is the case of the exhibitions and works La tiendita y la pirámide del campo (Centro Cultural City Bank, Asunción, 2017), Reflexiones alrededor de una fachada, (2da Bienal Internacional de Asunción, 2017) and the unfulfilled project La cura del conquistador (also conceived for 2018 Paraguay).
The former was inspired by rural work and how some simple boxes could become the material or base for a massive, nearly-six-metre long and tall pyramid. For the latter, light impressions of photographs taken from the glass façade of the Congreso de la Nación in Asunción, fragmented and burnt by the indigenous farmers’ protests built a chaotic space within a room, where victims and executioners became one under the effects of violence. La cura del conquistador included an installation with a mound of Paraguayan soil, named Yvy Pyta (coloured soil in Guarani), thus evoking the charm of its chromatism, its mineral richness, plasticity and fertility, plus a fourminute-long video after which the work was named. It suggested the possibility that, upon his arrival at America (or any other land), the European conquistador would question his origin values and, instead of destroying and attempting to convert the indigenous culture in his image and likeness, he would let himself get carried away by the ancestral force of the land and the kindness of the human being in a kind of cure of return to Pachamama or Mother Earth. This exhibition brought two aesthetics face to face – a very tellurian aesthetic connected to Guarani roots, and another very technological and contemporary aesthetic, making us wonder about the real possibility of a connection between both.
The political aspect of these installations, dominated by visual elements of abstract, non-realistic nature, in spite of the use of daily-life elements and objects, tell us about his interest in a type or art full of effects and sensations, alluding to economic and accessibility inequities, armed warfare and environmental issues, as well as core situations of contemporary world processes.
This permanence or insistence on the evoked, the suggested, is what we see when he resumes the path of his abstract paintings in the current exhibition. If we were able to witness the way in which they all occur in his workshop, we would realise that all that surrounds him and all he experiences are a motivation and an arsenal for his paintings. There is not a before or after, except for the dates given. It is a fusion of sensitive events which dictates all that the artist needs to organise, and it is also the autonomy of the created plastic form that dictates the action.
Previous abstract series were dominated by textures, or a specific colour palette, or the dominance of depths and spaces, such as shapes or solutions that pointed to a unique type of conceptual narrative. Here, however, the key characteristic will be an abundance of colour, only compensated by the heterogeneity of shapes and the diversity of experiential arguments through which he tries to communicate. It is for this reason that the solutions vary from the strident unity of colour, while barely taking into account the type of brushstroke, more or less use of the spatula against the canvas, or a profuse or restrained of space and matter/texture.
States of mind, positions before knowledge and perception processes are revealed to us pictorially moderated by the urgency of the titles, which end up anticipating a core question of their relationship, the confluence of matter, the sensitive and the visual in the concretion of a state of things that are displayed for us. Truth is, once more Dimitri Kosiré has risen in the dazzling spirituality of his paintings, dictated by creative impulses and dissimilar models of confrontation od the subject matter with its existential reality.
El perro chamán, Mescalinien (homage to Henry Michaux), Un Pavarotti canta mejor sobre su arbol (homage to Alejandro Jodorowski), Yvy Pyta, all from 2024, ó Capirosca do Carnaval, Jazz give me the hit, Lo tácito (about Jacques Lacán and how the unspoken resurfaces like a volcanic eruption within), O mundo do fondo do mar, Si fuera una abeja or Cheescake o Panna cotta ¿ , El sueño de la ballena, from 2025, tell us about the contemporary man, anxious and joyful, reluctant and conservative, free and trapped. Each painting is a conclusive version of his existence, a stroke of luck, a scream in the dark, the banging end of a hypothesis, and the final consecration of our chaos.
Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda. (Matanzas, Cuba, 1967).
Graduada de Historia del Arte, Facultad de Artes y Letras, Universidad de La Habana (1993) y del postgrado Estudios y Políticas Culturales, Centro de Investigaciones Culturales “Juan Marinello”, La Habana (2007). Curadora del Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam y de la Bienal de La Habana, organizadora de sus Eventos Teóricos (2003-2016) y directora de dicha institución (2016-2018). Curadora invitada de Bienal Arte Nuevo Interactiva, Mérida, Yucatán (2007). Cocuradora de la I, II y III Bienales de Asunción (2015, 2017 y 2019) y Curadora invitada XX, XXI y XXII Bienal de Curitiba (2015, 2017 y 2019). Premio de Crítica “Marcelo Pogolotti” de la UNEAC (1998), Premio Nacional de Crítica “Guy Pérez Cisneros” (1999 y 2001) y Premio Nacional de Curaduría (1995, 2023 y 2024), del Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas de Cuba. Curadora de Arte Cubano en Cuba y el exterior, y autora de artículos y libros sobre el tema. Vicepresidenta de la sección de Teoría y Crítica de la UNEAC (2007-2020) y de la Sección CUBA, Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte (AICA) (2018-2020). Conferencista invitada en Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, MACO, Monterrey; Queens University, Kingston, Canadá; Concordia University, Montreal, Canadá; York University y Toronto University, Toronto, Canadá; Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile;, Bienal de Karachi, Pakistán; 1er Festival Internacional de las Artes de Argel; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rostock, Alemania, y City University of New York, Duke
University, University of North Caroline in Chapel Hil y Wishita State University, todas de Estados Unidos. Actualmente es aspirante a Doctora en Ciencias del Arte por la Universidad de las Artes de La Habana, curadora de Galería Habana, Asesora de Arte en Génesis Galerías de Arte, y curadora del Proyecto y Residencia Artística UnPack Studio/La Casa de la Salamandra. (dannysmdeoca@gmail.com )