Salitre

Waves of rain and salt

Las Palmas has an intermittent microclimate during part of the summer; the donkey’s belly is the grey dome that shelters us from the August sun, the city is perceived in black and white. It penetrates the soul… suddenly everything comes crashing down on us, what we want is to be somewhere else, in a place where we can walk and breathe in Technicolor.

Perhaps that was my state of mind on the way to the artistic appointment; the critical spirit towards the drifts of the city is sharpened in this circumstance and I needed a corner of beauty, far from the noise and the ugliness of so much asphalt. So, in an instinctive way, I went to meet him, to bring this desired reality closer to me.

I felt something like that when Capi opened the door to his studio in a neighbourhood of the Upper City. In front of my eyes and everywhere visual flashes of currents, reliefs and oceans appeared, everything in that space was material for its own liberation, and as I ascended to his paradise I calmed down.

I remembered that even if we had taken the asphalt to the beach itself, the elements were still there and that the endless wars, including the ideological or thought wars that our history accumulates up to the present day, had not destroyed the art of painting; on the contrary, Capi seemed to be committed to correcting the destruction: waves of rain and salt in the path of cyclones, walls of water that raise a bow to the sky, a lens to understand civilisation in its fragments, to call for it and to approach with irreducible elegance the most terrible of our current realities, our place in the world.

It was in ancient China that the great masters praised the landscape as a way to channel essential questions that go directly to our relationship with the world around us. Landscape painting with paper and ink became a symbol of civilisation.

This link between art, the environment, ethics and aesthetics came to me when Capi Cabrera showed me his delicate but enveloping work, and I observed the fine and brilliant trace left by the almost calligraphic gesture of his brush, as a way of allowing the paint to slide between the imaginary and the abstract on its own canvas, fleeing from the digital and perhaps responding to the possibility of a limited and frustrating figuration. Her paintings are surfaces that invite us to deposit what poetic consciousness imagines; and as my eye glided over her canvas, my approach also rose to a higher order of interpretation.

Little by little, perched on the crests and folds of her colourful mountains, I was at the mercy of a wallow, as if engulfed by the Great Wave of Kanagawa (Katsushika Hokusai, 1830), which led me to delve deeper into what lies beyond appearances. superficial nature, what moves the universe, and I moved to those small comings and goings of our tiny lives in the majesty of the cosmos.

A coming and going that is also an analogy between the nature of painting itself and sea currents, energy transfers, rivers in the sea that connect us on a planetary scale. Currents that intertwine and branch, as if something were shaking a giant container of paint, and through which Capi navigates like a surfer, playing with the grooves and the flow of the paint.

Our artist points to the slippery possibility of confirming his desire for transience by treating painting as a field of observation – there is a slowness trapped in the process that leads to contemplation – so we tend to stop time and obtain equivalences in the colours with their plastic coldness and their mythical warmth. It is a spiritual and irreducible background: blues, greens, reds, ochres… Water, sun, sand and fire, the whole circle of life was there, I felt I was touching an eternal antiquity, where the earth sinks into the oceans and volcanoes rise from its bowels, but I could also remain silent before the vertigo of finding myself completely alone in the sea, seeing those who circle in the darkness, in the claustrophobic immensity, in the blue wall that stands abandoned in the open sea, a tense vision that combines loneliness and death.

It was as if he had been there before, on the mysterious islands of our refuges, on the abyssal plains that yearn for the surface to be lands covered in ochre cinders. Submerged in the currents that stir the algae… An arc that surrounds us, swept by the earth’s rotation and in which the painting seems to be the sonar of the deep holes, a crack through which to sneak in and listen to the echoes of the reef, to see the silt that covers the plain and the thick layers of sediment.

I leave the place under the influence of this pigment-diving surfer and am reunited with the splendour of the yellow buses full of people in summer shirts with their coloured towels under their arms to get to the beach. Will the sun have risen?

Gopi Sadarangani