Review: Saúl Gil Corona

«Art doesn't require understanding, it requires spirit, soul. Art has to be interpreted emotionally, not intellectually, because the moment of emotional empathy comes in intellectual darkness». Those are Tarkovsky's words, and he insisted: «people without culture are far more ready to interpret art spiritually, because they have no pretensions, whereas someone cultured is full of them».

Today's art, and probably the art of any period, is suffocated by pretensions, beating around the bush and gin and tonics. Few people feel art. Instead they think art while surrounding themselves with it like one more prop of their social identity: the scarf, the exhibition and the vegan place on the corner.

That's why art, ours, needs more guys like Saúl Gil Corona, the artist who falls asleep like Prometheus, exhausted, and wakes up with the brimming arms of Atlas, holding up his world, which will be devoured again before the moon hides away.

His soul is fire

El artista maduro no necesita estar revuelto para crear. El artista «perro viejo» no debe esperar a ser devorado para facturar obras que devoren al espectador; tiene que ser capaz de mantener una suficiente distancia emocional  con respecto a sus ángeles y demonios para encauzar una trayectoria artística. Todo esto es lo que dice el manual. Pero la realidad es que se crea mejor embestido, filtrando la sangre fresca como tono principal de la obra.

Saúl Gil Corona is a boxer who «Makes so as not to get tangled up in his thoughts». His soul blazes in artworks that hit the viewer hard. In No habrá paz para los sueños, a title carved in stone, a naked man takes up almost the whole surface of the panel. His furious shout booms out until it nearly rattles the viewer's gin and tonic. His outsized fists, clenched, threaten the sky, because dreams, in our dreams, can't be stopped…

Gil Corona enjoys these exuberant, immense human types, capable of threatening the gods but also of loving their women. Maybe they're a kind of self-portrait, a projection of an artist who hides nothing, showing even the inside of his body, sometimes made of recycled material: cans, chains, screws… The aesthetic result of this mixed technique has an unmeasured power that, like a mallet in the viewer's heart, pumps blood and sets off the alarms.

The boxer's embrace

La trayectoria expresiva de Gil Corona partió de la música en su primera juventud, para continuar con las letras y desembocar en el arte plástico. Es precisamente esta necesidad de expresión la que hace temblar al autor catalán y le empuja a abrazarse a sus canciones, a sus poemas y a sus lienzos. Busca calor y lo encuentra, como lo encuentran también los personajes de uno de sus motivos más habituales: el abrazo.

Our strongman friend is the protagonist of most of these paintings, in which the artist has fun combining recycled scrap with lines of his own poetry. His embraces can carry a touch of eroticism, but tenderness is the dominant feeling, as in Manos grandes para proteger, nunca para dañar or in Soul Me Tight II. Gil Corona mines this artistic vein for other subjects too, like the curious and solemn La Ciega Espartana.

Born in 1980, Gil Corona is on the rise in his artistic career, settling into his subjects, leaving some experiments behind and hinting at new solutions. So some artworks, like Manéjame la cabeza, hit you with their calligraphic expressionism, and others, like La sangre del sueño, cast a spell like a sinister melody.

Gil Corona has no intention of staying down on the canvas. The boxer from Mollet del Vallés will go on shouting canvases and poems, as long as the soul burns, as long as there are dreams left, as long as one viewer gives in to feeling and leaves his pretension over by the canapé table.

We invite you to visit Saúl Gil Corona's gallery on Artelista.