Raul Diaz Journey

Sleeping Slowly: The Poetic Vessels of Raul Diaz

Come sleepwalk with me. Don’t you ever walk in your sleep? How do you remember when you are not consciously thinking? Did you ever go back to where you were? Did you just dream your sleepwalk? How do you know? Do some of us sleepwalk better than others? How fast do I walk in my sleep? Do you/I sometimes sleepwalk slowly? Where did you/we go? How do they/you remember? Who do they/we tell? Why? Raul Diaz invites us to remember... to go back... and to return again to those places which we keep like hidden treasures... memories which we do not consider all the time, but special gems which we take out and examine from time to time. Sometimes he reminds us of these moments even when we least expect them or when we are not even looking for them. But they are there all the while. With the help of the artist’s gentle but sure hand, the viewer of his paintings joins in like a hesitant sleepwalker and makes a first, careful, trusting, seeking step as if into a narrow boat which Diaz has prepared to take us to these secret places. Finding a delicate balance in the soft rocking of the small barge, we too begin to dream of our own memories, unaware that we are now in a reality which is a world twice removed from waking rationality. In this poetic world our sleepwalking eyes slow to a pace outside everyday time. Still, we dream on freely as we see the ribs of the wooden planks of our small boat transfigure themselves into the veins of an upturned leaf floating delicately upon the water. But we are not in a free fall. Once in the dreamy vessels of his compositions, Diaz assumes control and reassures his fellow traveler that he has been here and there before. He is the skilled craftsman of these tiny boats of memory. The unsteadiness of the humid surfaces is braced by a strong sense of symmetry, a kind of classical balance and

equilibrium, which structures the senses. Gaining confidence, we note that we are not alone. Along the shores, which we are passing, we see the slow-motion saltimbanques performing. They retrace the time-honored rituals of ancient family visits to the same lake along the historical paths of Picasso and Cezanne, all fathers and grandfathers who have dreamed between these banks of memory and order. Now giving over, we become the delicate sleepwalkers in these vessels. Drifting through our dreamy landscape, we softly somersault between memories of particular and architectural sites and universal archetypal forms, between silence and chorus, between self- denunciation (am I really here?) and the obsessive markings of an anonymous goldsmith (someone else is really here before I am,) and between reason and fantasy. Our surrealist acrobatics dissolve into a muted celebration of life, which envelops us in the richly rolling Argentine landscape. Framed by a layering of plastered walls and tilted surfaces, we dance with the dreaming groups of people on floating horizons. Momentarily we wonder if we are awake. Where are we? What are these landscapes? Who is with us? Our judgments try to take shape. Are we simply looking at paintings by Raul Diaz or are we finding ourselves within them? Slowly we recognize that such provocative visions are the incised, chiseled, drawn, stenciled, repeated and painted barges of memory which Diaz presents us for these shared voyages balanced on the keels of craft and conscience. These fragile and yet resistant sloops sail at the speed of pyramids navigated by the profiled and frontal priests on slow-moving, inward seas. Even the names of these dream vessels emerge from the alternating attention first to insignificance and then to a fetish which, like the sleepwalker’s eye, patiently focuses on what may appear to be neglected but which proves to be an ark of souvenir and passage.