Dario Basso

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Darío Álvarez Basso (* 1966 in Caracas ) is a Spanish painter. He lives and works in Madrid .

life and work

Adolescent years and training

Darío Álvarez Basso was born in Caracas in 1966 , grew up partly there and partly in Galician Vigo in Spain , surrounded by an intellectual family with strong inclinations towards painting and literature. After a brief interlude in the rock and comic scene, he spent three months at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1984 and joined the Talleres de Arte Actual in the Circulo de Bellas Artes. Dario Villalba, Eduardo Arroyo and Frederic Amat awakened his calling there and introduced him to the arts and the art world. Without any further training, the twenty-year-old immediately began a work that has been restless to this day, entrusting all of the initial ideas and information to the “Libreta”, the sketchbook that accompanies it constantly. What is laid out there in the most delicate strokes and lavish tones can develop into violent and heavy compositions in centimeter-thick paint or tar with various collage inclusions on the canvases up to five meters high. For this, the autodidact uses completely unconventional means, paints, even pours his pictures, often outdoors in nature, horizontally on the ground, incorporating the environment and the weather as well as direct or indirect natural forces or the genius loci in myth or history. It rained or hailed on many works, some he washed in rivers.

content

In terms of content, Basso's work is also of great diversity and enormous geo-cultural-political universality. He has made it his task to merge cultures in the past and present, in history, myth, religion, legend, literature, philosophy but also natural science, especially the East and the West. In 2004, the thirty-eight year old was able to show a comprehensive touring exhibition of his work with the help of the Spanish “Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation” and its sub-organizations in many countries in South America with an accompanying opulent catalog. Since 2008, Basso's installation “Algorithmi dixit”, consisting of 23 desert tent tarpaulins of 4.3 × 2.5 m painted in portrait format and paraphrases of Arabic ornamentation, has been roaming the capitals of the Middle East. Basso's work is exhibited and collected primarily in Spain, Portugal, Venezuela, USA, Germany and Switzerland, for which Othmar Triebold discovered this painter very early and exhibited it for the first time in his gallery in Basel in 1990. Basso not only grew up in a cosmopolitan family in two cities, two countries and two continents, he also moved on as a wanderer between the worlds, also artistically between abstraction and figuration to this day. Until 1987 he painted dark, violent figures in front of a light background in Madrid in the “spirit of the times”. Then he moved to Paris for two years. There, more concrete, precisely separated forms such as saw blades or circular saw blades, which he may have seen rusting there during a short stay in Morocco, dominate his paintings on irregular canvases found somewhere with very concrete titles and Arabic inscriptions. While still in Paris, remembering the Mohammedan-Christian conflict in medieval Spain , he came across the similar, even earlier one between Carthage and Rome, which also had its critical center in Spain with Hannibal's starting point. After all, Hannibal was the only one who could have seriously endangered the rise of the Roman Empire. This tough and by no means unambiguous or short power struggle had already been a struggle between East and West, a clash of cultures, as the Carthaginians came from the east and the Roman Empire is the direct and everywhere noticeable forerunner of today's so-called Western culture. The scholarship to the Spanish Academy in Rome in 1989/90 and a photo of half the ceiling of the Pantheon led to the compositions on the Hannibal theme that now accompany the work.

Study trips, stays and scholarships

In 1990/91 he was back in Paris and dealt with political and social issues of the world, painting its continents. In 1991/92 after a stay in Senegal , he worked again in Italy , in the small Umbrian town of Pissigano in an abandoned church. The frescoes still visible there reminded Basso daily of the entire history of art there, but above all of the spirituality on which it is based. This stimulated him to "see" pictures that look at the viewer.

A Fulbright scholarship brought him to New York from 1992 to 1994 , to the present and to the people who were treated in full in the “Libretas”, but reduced to a medium “spine” in the larger works. From 1995 to 1998 Basso was back in Madrid . He drew a first sum, walked the St. Jakobs-Weg, on which he was particularly impressed by the bones found by ancestors of the Neanderthals in Atapuerca, and for the first time erected entire walls of half a hundred of his works, his photographs and reproductions of objects that inspired him. Views and excerpts to "Antropogeografias" together. In the process, collages increased , in which he also included leaves from nature, which led from 1999 to 2001 to “open-air studios” in the rainforest of Venezuela and the forests of the Dominican Republic. He was particularly enthusiastic about the huge leaves of the banana and palm trees, individually in portrait format, especially in the “ Humboldt ” series or star-shaped as “Flowers to Andy”. In the years 2002 to 2004 he again drew a sum from these diverse experiences in Madrid , occupied himself more and more with photography, including underwater photography, which he revised and declined in long series.

Awards and awards

  • 1988: Prize Muestra de Arte Joven, Madrid
  • 1989: Santa Lucia Painting Contest, Madrid
  • 1989: Academia Española en Roma, grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome
  • 1991: Cité des Artistes, Paris
  • 1992: Fulbright Scholarship, Spanish-North American Committee, New York
  • 1994: Ojo Crítico Awards, Radio Nacional de España, Madrid
  • 2002: IV ABC Painting Awards, Madrid
  • 2006: VI Salón de Outono de Pintura, Galician Royal Academy of Fine Arts
  • 2008: 1st Premio Hondo de Pintura Ayuntamiento de La Garriga Barcelona

Exhibitions (selection)

Works in public collections

literature

  • Alvarez Basso. Exhibition catalog. Galerie Triebold, Basel , 1992
  • Dario Basso: Equinoctial . Exhibition catalog. Triebold Gallery, Rheinfelden , 1999
  • Helmut Herbst, City of Waiblingen (ed.): Dario Basso - Via Lactea . Dr. Cantz'sche Druckerei, Ostfildern , 2004
  • Dario Basso. Exhibition catalog. Edition SEACEX, 2004
  • Dario Basso: Algoritmi Dixit . Exhibition catalog. Edition SEACEX, 2008

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source: Darío Basso: exhibition catalog. Editions SEACEX, 2004, p. 127
personal data
SURNAME Basso, Darío
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Álvarez Basso, Darío (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Caracas