Raul Diaz Journey

these same vessels which once transported us. We can bridge the disconnected moments of the banal with the memory of our sleepwalk. Knowing that we cannot always remain in the poetry of contemplation, we realize something extraordinary: that the social conscience of the present too, can begin with dreams of our connections to the past. Here the remaining boundaries of this now only once-removed world subtly suggest the discipline of the artist’s fantastic effacement. Rather than marking the presence of the artist, these boundaries are established by geometric patterns of squares and rectangles, tools of the architect who builds the lasting integrity of a hazy dream. These vestiges of formal systems provide a map to remember the dream. Only now can the sleepwalker be distanced from the sleepwalking... the viewer imprinted in and on the scene. One is there and yet is not totally aware of being present. One sees and remembers, but at the same time cannot remember exactly why or where. It is just from this ambiguity that Raul Diaz distills the symbolic relics of the personal and universal from a wider stream of unannounced concerns. For the measured step into these boats becomes a foothold for all sizes of those who have been there before, like ourselves, and those which may come after, like ourselves. Diaz reminds us that to remember is the act of the present which sets the present apart and yet unites the present with time. By sleeping slowly in his poetic vessels we just might find what we are looking for... and did not know to remember it.

But these vessels are not nostalgic barges of mourning which crisscross the waters of the Terra del Fuego. Nor are they blackened tugboats wearily yet relentlessly chugging to some nocturnal disappearance in the wilds of Patagonia. The sleep of reason here does not produce monsters. While we are not sure of the nature of the embarkation, somehow we sense that the sunlit shores are not prison facades; the gardens of rich foliage are not poisonous, the cascade is not the delusion of the deluge. Everything is connected when we sleep slowly here. We are what we remember and in remembering, exist. Leaves, trees, stilts, tables and boats for a moment form the frames of our remembering. Sleeping slowly, we hold briefly the different images, which contain the shadows of our lives and silhouette them in our dream windows. As a carpenter of moments of passage, Raul Diaz reconstructs a quiet vision of change and motion along shifting lines of family and landscape that offer ambiguity and uncertainty, but which remain centered and carefully measured and anchored. We reorient our lives with a remembered family history, which gives us place and direction. But Raul steers us about in an open boat through our own fantasies evoked by his own. His work is more poetry than prose. His cautiously tumbling nomads beckon us to join in the spiraling dance. With them we float easily above the claustrophobic line of strict, narrative sequence. Diaz conjures just enough for us to know where we sleepwalk. Our personal dreams are deftly balanced with the recognition that he and his family have been to these places. He throws us a loose rope to someone else’s dreams and voyages. Here we can sleep slowly and trust our dreams and his. The step is short from sleeping to waking on solid ground. Remember we were twice removed. As in Watteau’s early rococo painting, Pilgrimage to/ from Cythera , Time tugs at us to leave with the realization that leaving is a return to unbending boundary and the weight of time. But refreshed and reconnected we can now carry with us

Shaw Smith, Ph.D. Professor of Art Davidson College