Marc Gonz
Swarm Boy
2022

About the Item

MARC GONZ THE HIDDEN GAZE When confronted with the universe of Marc Gonz, we discover creations that seem to be the result of a working session of a hyperactive action painter who could not stop feverishly adding layers and layers of paint to the canvas. But these beautiful waterfalls with a profusion of colors are obviously not the work of an uncontrolled improvisation. Instead, as a painter, Marc Gonz carefully applies the chosen touches of color to the surface until they take their final, almost sculptural form. What he wants to achieve is a three-dimensional painting that occupies space and not just covers the wall on which it hangs. The artworks look like the stiffened remnants of his artistic process. The technique Marc uses is close to the classical painting method called "impasto": he mixes his paint on the canvas itself and applies it in such thick layers that the strokes of the brush or painter's knife are clearly visible. In this way, the painting acquires a special texture and it seems as if the paint emerges from the canvas and grows buirently like some kind of fungus or strange unknown plant. 'Impasto painting' was first discovered as a technical experiment in the 17th century when some Baroque style painters tried to represent the volume in folds of clothes or the texture of jewels. Artists like Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Diego Velázquez attempted Impasto to skillfully depict the minute details like folds, wrinkled skin or the sparkle of elaborately crafted armor, jewellery, and rich fabrics. We also find it in nineteenth-century landscape, naturalist and romantic painting, where it was used by painters like John Constable to convey the raw, rugged tumble of rocks, soil and cliff faces with a rough, experimental energy. In the twentieth century we see how Van Gogh used it to ‘express the turbulent emotions of his artist’s mind'. Also Fauvists like Maurice de Vlaminck or Andre Derrain brought the technique to their experimental territory. Expressionist and abstract painters like Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Karel Appel or Frank Auerbach went even further and searched for a direct relation with the action of the body and the application of paint on the canvas, by dripping or smearing the paint on the canvas with their hands. And in fact we can also how nowadays painters like Richter, Kiefer or Peter Doig keep exploring the possibilities of texture in paint. Most of Marc Gonz's recent works are portraits or fragments of human faces: we recognize the shape, see ears, noses and lips of figures that look like young men. What is striking about all these works is that behind each of these layers of colored paint we can repeatedly discover a human eye as a kind of underlying, central point. It is the only part of the canvas that seems to have been spared from the aggressive splashes of color. It is as if the person portrayed is looking at us from this virgin place, from underneath the various layers. It is a human eye, buried by the overdose of paint. The person portrayed seems to hide behind a bizarre colorful burden of a mask. The works seem unwilling to reveal their true soul. The artist sometimes describes his works as "winks of foam”. By a "wink" we mean a blink, the rapid opening and closing of an eye, to greet the viewer and give him a sense of complicity. It is as if from behind each work someone is looking at us, seeming to want to answer our curiosity, yet observing us from behind its protective colorful camouflage. Marc's works are clearly portraits of people we identify as anonymous, adolescent or younger men. Sometimes he betrays their origins ("Thai eye"/"Candy man"). They often look a bit like clowns with cone-shaped Pierrot hats on their heads. They seem innocent and friendly freaks that emerge from the artist's imagination. The shape of their heads and their entire faces are covered in color, as if a giant, colorful birthday cake was thrown in their faces. The excessive amount of paint does indeed resemble a colored cake and reminds us of the famous Laurel & Hardy movie "The battle of the Century" in which more than 3,000 whipped cream cakes were used in an epic cake fight. The figure of the comedian and the clown is a melancholic personnage: at the same time victim of accidents and reason for our laughter. They are tragicomic beings whose lives are made up of laughter and tears. We find the same kind of personnages with the filmmaker David Lynch : the main characters of "The elephant Man" and "Eraserhead" are the same kind of melodramatic and strange peronnages. Indeed, the contours of their monstrous appearance can be somewhat compared to the faces of Marc staring at us.  Like Lynch Marc is fascinated by the mysterious, the spiritual and the occult. He likes to describe his works as meditative exercises who talk about the spirts hidden behind the colorful façade. The artist invites us as viewers to dive in our subconscious and with our eyes scrap the paint away to discover the hidden soul of each work. This way the eyes that are looking at us from behind the abstract surface will reveal us their secret as an echo.    Erich Weiss 2023

Creator:

Marc Gonz (1973, Spanish)

Creation Year:

2022

Dimensions:

Height: 3.15 in (8 cm)Diameter: 39.38 in (100 cm)

Medium:

Oil

Movement & Style:

Abstract

Period:

21st Century