Gazes into the Abyss

Víctor Dolz (Begur, 1945) is something of a secret artist. He is indifferent to the comedy that the art world never tires of representing. He paints in a regular and methodical manner somewhat on the sidelines in his studios in Begur and Palafrugell. He works without haste, conscious of doing just what he needs to do. Dolz carefully manages his words just like his artwork, where everything tends to become essential, but is generous when observers approach his works along with the bareness they expect.

There’s no trace of Begur’s blue sky or sea in Dolz’s paintings. Nor is there a trace of the cork oak or sandy soil interwoven in Pla’s gray notebook. There is no trace, naturally, of a certain vision of the Empordà landscape (understood in an essentially scenographic sense) that Dalí, the great devouring beast, would bring to its ultimate consequences. Not a single trace of any of this. Above all, Dolz is someone who naturally places himself on the sidelines of the brilliant spectacles that painting often celebrates: his version of the Empordà, if it

Nothing is farther away than the Dolz universe (the artist’s own surname seems to deny, with the final letter, the sugary version of a "sweet" that would be absolutely alien to him): the artist from Begur knows all too well that ambition always succumbs to the relentless judgment of history. He also knows, of course, that flesh is an imperfect container yet a content at the same time. That is why his materialism has much to do with Artaud’s psychological materialism where "the absolute mind is also absolutely carnal." As Susan Sontag wrote in Under the Sign of Saturn, "His intellectual depression is at the same time the most acute physical depression, and every statement he makes about his consciousness is also an affirmation about his body. In reality, what causes the incurable pain of consciousness with Artaud [and certainly with Dolz as well] is precisely this refusal to consider the mind outside the reality of the flesh. Far from being grim, his martyred conscience is the result of his unruly relationship with the body.”

These bodies began to be ebullient with matter, of paint and flesh that held them firmly anchored to the surface of the work but that slowly and progressively were squeezed, losing physical density in exchange for another kind of density, one could say psychological, much more subtle than their predecessor. The omnipresence of heads is imposed on the heaviness of the bodies. The idea is perfectly expressed by the great Michel Tournier: "I have always suspected that the head was nothing more than a ball inflated by the spirit (spiritus, air) that lifts the body and keeps it in an upright position, at the same time freeing it from most of its weight. Thanks to the head, the body is spiritualized, stark, suppressed." Decapitation, of course, would prove Tournier’s thoughts: "I solemnly affirm that a body without a head weighs three or four times as much as it did in life." Dolz’s paintings also gain weight as they lose matter. //