Fernando Cocchiarale

The meaning of Dudu Garcia's painting is circular. Its destination, like that of all painting, is the wall. But in the particular case of his paintings the idea seems more pertinent still.

Seen that way we might think of the history of painting as a history of the wall: from the prehistoric caves, where the pictorial intervention merged with the nature of the stone, through the walls of the temples and palaces of Egypt, Babylon, Crete, Pompeii, Mexico and Cuzco, covered in images, to the invention of the framed picture, which, freed from the building, could now be moved to any other wall.

The history of painting could also be thought through the various systems of spatial organisation, whether by drawing, by colour, or by social and religious hierarchy. The perspectival, shaded space of classical art and the planar quality of modern painting were powerful systems that oriented and informed artistic production for generations.

The contemporary painter, however, no longer has those collective spatial systems that once informed and lent meaning to the body of painting of a given period. The central challenge for anyone who wants to paint has therefore become the invention of a system of their own, however indebted to the work of other artists, capable of lending meaning to the work and carrying it beyond the commonplaces: that the canvas is an empty surface to be filled by the artist's talent, sensibility and technical skill; that artistic expression brings to the surface an inner world, given once and for all, as though reason and intelligence were less necessary to creation than sensibility.

Dudu Garcia has managed to produce a system founded on experimenting with the poetic possibilities of a painting that draws its basic spatial order from the marks left by time and by people on walls and other real surfaces.

The beautiful result does not come, however, from any decorative impulse, since it is the product of concept and chance. Dudu exposes what the picture, understood as the movable window of the Renaissance, used to cover: the wall. In place of the window, parts and fragments of walls.

His paintings sit, as we have seen, between two surfaces fundamental to the history of painting, wall and picture, the surfaces of pictorial practice par excellence, which here refer to one another ceaselessly and circularly in these works by Dudu Garcia, underlining a real tension that no canvas can ever be rid of.

Fernando Cocchiarale (2014)