„ALLÍ NO HAY NADA“

 

In the south, far in the south.

It is there where all contrasts appear to collapse, there, in the midst of landscapes which overflow vision and saturate with excesses of colours– lakes of every blue, glaciers, geysers, mountains.

Suddenly, the earth seems to turn inside out: the absolute nothingness emerges and upholds a catharsis with metaphysical emptiness. This event is the strongest visual exercise, for one completely bares oneself so as to be capable of beholding such beauty. There, just there, in those bleak deserts which appear, everything begins to make sense. It is this endless horizon in which the soul is forced to open itself to such expanses.

Patagonia is a geological lesson of letting go, a Bardo Thodol of stone, an acquiring of consciousness of death, where tatters of the seen, the lived, the known remains captured in the rocks. It is this nothingness which breathes, and breathes us in. An enormous, uncontaminated pulmo vitæ. Those who seek it do not know that in that land they are learning to read their own final fate, their great destiny.

Gabriel Kondratiuk comes from that remote part of the world, from that part of life, and there he sets his painting, in that fissure, in which everything changes and the wealth of the landscape sinks into the roots of nothingness. Thus, his works seem to be born out of the infinite silence of Patagonia, out of the ‘self’ of the earth, out of his own self. From the latter, solely his astonished eyes appear to arise and, while leaving behind the splendours of surpassed colours, they seem to show the sacred, final hue.

 

Prof. Rocío Morillo Domínguez