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Saiace:
External and intimate resonance of everyday life
by Raúl Santana
Néstor Saiace’s work – a display of over forty year’s activity – is a conclusive assertion of that painting which, for ever, faces us again to the inscrutable part of the enigmas of vision, those in which the painter’s gesture moulds reality to continue yielding other worlds. Deeply rooted in the «modernity» tradition, it is from this point that Saiace arises as a defined individuality conveying by way of his pictures a powerful feeling of every-day life since his usual environment is his starting point.
There are no breaking points in Saiace’s work: at times nostalgic, at times anguished – either in the intimate themes such as his still lifes and human figures or in the publicly overt tango scenes, urban landscapes or social events – often enough it bears a strong drive towards celebration.
To add something about Saiace’s art is not an easy task, after the magnificent essay written by the poet Federico Garcia Romeu, but we shall try to highlight some modulations of this compact and coherent work which, as in all authentical painting, feeds on an undaunting impulse to seize the imaginary: reality.
A first approach to this work discloses subtle changes over the years, an identical mark pervading his stages like a fresh and spontaneous breath which more than fixing them suggests the objects, transmitting the powerful traces of what is being represented. Such traces and there must be no doubt to this respect – are the ciphers which the human figures or the objects have bestowed upon the artist’s subjectivity; his images, thus suggested, are perpetually materializing and vanishing and would appear to mean that the human figures, the objects and the scenes, share an imponderable moment, where they acquire their bright presence, which the artist captures vertiginously, blending the actual light and another, unreal, to render his own version of the theme.
Owner of a distinct expressive temperament, Saiace creates form out of the pictorial mass and the design is the result of its matter; at times, when forms may give in to the power of gesture, he sketches them with outlining strokes, but in general, drawing and painting are not two isolated moments but a single moment, embracing them both. In this connection, the artist subscribes to that trend, among us, that boasts of characters like Victorica and Russo, to mention just two paradigms of that long pictorial tradition.
In Saiace’s paintings the subject is never the world’s descriptivity but the depiction of its utmost external and intimate reverberations. Like all inspired artists, he paints the canvas with urgency lest the world might suddenly vanish and he were urged to crystallize one of its privileged moments.
Far from the realistic and methaphysical stillness, the paintings, with their constant display of contrasts, color ranges and counterpoints, sometimes bring about nocturnality and summon joy and daylight; they are a stirring stimulus to movement, a result of the artist’s seizure and transfiguration of that which is contingent.
Even his still lifes – a genre so given to quietness – are pierced by that fleeting breath that the artist translates with his permanent sketching of the form.
I can imagine Saiace facing the model, choosing those deeply felt notes, which once painted on the canvas, will make of our reality that other reality: his own art.
Raúl Santana
Ex Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires.
August, 1999