dEmo

If there is a Spanish artist who has understood, with meridian accuracy, what the art ecosystem is all about, it is, without a doubt, Eladio de Mora (dEmo). His audacity and intelligence put him at the top of the list of those who understand, like few others, the great utopia of the avant-garde of linking art with life.

The most powerful weapon of dEmo is humor, and the greatest virtue of his work is that in it there is a very intelligent process of fetishization of the domestic and the ordinary elevated to a cultural category. I know of very few artists who are capable of managing so many audiences and always come out of this management with flying colors. dEmo's proposal is located on that threshold of taste that affects everyone equally. From the most demanding and honest children's audience to the most adult audience, everyone likes the work equally. And this does not mean, in any way, that naivety is a condition per se of its story. Contrary to what many people think they know, his work handles, with an enviable skill, the resources of double meaning and the strategies of persuasion. dEmo is an extremely intelligent and audacious guy. He knows, and very much so, that the value of art and its social efficacy are no longer discussed in the high sphere defined by a group of academics sitting in their respective bunkers. The artist is aware that it is in the favorable social contract and in the capital of affective and profitable relationships, where, in truth, the artistic proposal earns its possibility of being.

I had the good fortune to be among the first critics who made value judgments on his work, so I know very well his itineraries and drifts, as well as his enormous bombproof tenacity. Back then, a few years ago, the institutional and gallery system of Spanish art was more closed, orthodox and conservative than it is today. When the art galleries, at times extremely conservative and boring, did nothing more than postpone their requests and ignore his work because they found it suspicious or because it did not have the desired "conceptual range", dEmo decided to "assault" the facades of the museums. I remember right now the divers on the façade of the IVAM in Valencia, the bears at the DA2 in Salamanca, the totemic red bear at the entrance of IFEMA presiding over the ARCO fair, the Baroja Museum in Gijon, the Santo Domingo Cifuentes Museum of Contemporary Art in Guadalajara, the Museum Arterra Contemporary of Vienna in Austria, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba in Havana, the MACAY Museum of Contemporary Art of Yucatan in Mexico, among others.

A legion of multicolored bears, ducks that reach unsuspected dimensions, disturbing and spectral white divers, huge flowers, rhinoceroses on fire in their onslaught, cows of all sizes and colors, pigs, cats and robots, "penetrated", never better said, the power center of the Spanish Institution-Art. That was, undoubtedly, one of the most perverse and effective operations that the artist managed to carry out in the face of the ignorance, arrogance and short-sightedness of some gallery owners. It was thus that, suddenly, prestige credit and legitimization have accompanied the artist's name ever since. Against the tide or not, whether we like it or not, whether we like it or not, whether we are reluctant or not, we have to accept that he is one of the most singular Spanish artists, the most original and with the greatest international impact at this time.

His visual alphabet is unmistakable from every point of view. Pop aesthetics, the world of fashion and the industry in its most lapse sense, have served him as a base for the articulation of his own voice that invades -with impudence and a lot of fun- any space (artistic or not) of the global geography. dEmo is, strictly speaking, a competent and opportune artist. He knows how to choose the moment and prioritize his opportunities. His good character and his eternal smile have made him enjoy a great deal of affection. Between the social approval and the hedonistic efectism of his work, he manages to move like a fish in water. Hence his presence is expansive without being overpowering.

The playful dimension is, if anything, the space of greatest vitality in his proposal. dEmo is the king of modern Spanish sculpture. He struts among different morphologies, proportions that are modest and scandalous at the same time, extremely varied object typologies and a color scale that is not dented by any baroque epiphany. His assertive ability and his lack of modesty (in the best of senses) become his greatest allies. That is the reason why he manages to restore the value of everyday elements to ensure them as icons of contemporary culture. dEmo is, and he knows it, the Andy Warhol of Spanish art, without pretending that this comparison raises hackles and unleashes the wrath of others.

Every epoch tends to think, by egocentric defect, that it is the last one, that nothing good will come after it. Or, even worse, that every avant-garde revolution will end up, later on, as a fecal redoubt and excrescence. Be it one way or another, be it truth or lie, be it speculation or fact, the truth is that this artist, with all these assumptions on his shoulders, has always shown a blind trust in sculpture. And this personal devotion is justified by the fact that he understands that sculpture is not only an object, a volumetric and factual proposition, but more importantly, a split in the urban landscape, a commentary, a question, a gesture. All this without ever losing sight of the fact that a smile is better than a thousand words and sterile promises. The world is more grateful than ever for dEmo's sculpture. After so much pandemic, so much totalitarian rhetoric and so much death, we are looking for color, expressiveness and a sense of freedom. The Queen of Salsa already said it and we all repeat it: "we must not cry, life is a carnival". The work of dEmo celebrates life without concluding in a ridiculous epiphany.

He himself has spoken of his responsibility towards the aesthetic fact and of his contextual complicities. To the question about the intentions of his work, he answers "first, that it does not cause any harm to people. When a politician asks me what happens when you place a sculpture in a traffic circle, I tell them the same thing that happened with the Menina in San Sebastián de los Reyes, Madrid. It was very expensive and people criticized it, but after two months they didn't let them take it away. Sculptures create bonds of affection and identity with the place where they are located. People end up assuming them as their own, feelings of belonging are produced and managed". On the need to do and to say, he specifies that "it is a way of life. Since I was a child I have had this sensitivity and it is like breathing for me. Without art I wouldn't know what to do, it's a form of freedom, of expressing yourself and a motor of thought. For me sculpture is like a loudspeaker. When I do temporary installations and repeat the bears and put the same piece in the same colors, each time they want to see a different color bear. This is like a loudspeaker that gives the same idea in a multiplied form".

As the saying goes, "experience is a degree". This is precisely what the artist, who has accumulated a dizzying curriculum, uses to amass the sculptural in discursive terms and in its practical variants. The artist himself has come to affirm that "artistic creation is a way of seeing life differently, it is an experience that forces us to meditate at the same time that it demands and demands other answers". If in the Spanish panorama there is a connoisseur of postmodern culture as a systemic disavowal of absolutes, that is dEmo. This artist is more than aware of the crisis that every desire to do something new or different is going through. Not for nothing did he point out in an interview that "I believe that, as in fashion, everything has been invented. Everything exists, it is only necessary to give it another twist and take it out of context". This ability to notice the signs of his time and to get hold of them is one of the characteristics of his work. That is why he does not strive to be more original than anyone else, but to be more effective than many. It is not a matter of innovating but of re-founding the existing, of granting new meanings, of orchestrating new maps, of rescuing the eloquent will of art. dEmo knows that access to eternity is not given through the ecstasy or the ecstasy of the unique, of the laborious and clumsy search for the unique and unrepeatable. That access occurs, only and only when it is clear that art is not going anywhere or has a mystical relationship with the future, when it is known that art is all this that is happening right now while the textbook scholars and critics of repertoire ask the same questions as always.

Andres Isaac Santana.

Art Critic, essayist and exhibition curator.