By Alfredo Triff.There is something unique in the painting of the Santiago’s artist Eleomar Puente that aims to the kinetic melodrama of the form: To mold a nerve to the image before or after it’s coagulated into something essential. Extension of potential energy, figures in evolution, surreptitious actions, and hermetic symbols in fission state (as if they were part of a movie by director John Woo). A tropism art that tend to the oblique and to the grind; caustic wit, audacious, almost a fantasy.
In Freedom, for example, we can see ( from superior level), a boat made from the chassis of the typical American automobile of the 50s, its prow painted with scarlet sparkles – like a bloody omen of the journey. The ship is filled with emigrants who row at the same time, possibly crossing waters of the Caribbean Sea in North direction. While, an irritated and gigantic wave rises as a solid curse over the busy crew (it appears from the boat, a rare flavor, of discipline of a regatta competition).
The Secret is pure enigma: we can see the ephemeral flight of a dragonfly over an absolutely red deph (the color has a symbolic value), in the direction of a monster, half human, half mollusk (of long head, hair in a snail and pointed ears), just at the moment of covering the mouth with its hand.
In Paradox of a Destiny we distinguish what it seems to be an enormous Christmas garland, but that is in fact a dark wired fenced scope, closed in itself, populated with small structures composed of circular stairs and hollow facades. City of empty orbit, with its intangible metal flavor.
These images allude to the rarefied political and social space of the Latin American agenda: The typical excess of our civil hypertrophy, the social anomie of the underdeveloped world, the transfer of lives in open sea and the interminable rhetoric of power.
In the middle of that apparent austerity, a wink to innocence, to fantasy, to cartoon, is perceived; something that Puente uses as a hook. Each painting has a stamp of an obvious design, although per moments what it augurs can be difficult and hermetic (although examined closer it seems simple and direct). An unexpected scrupulous art, the one of Eleomar Puente, like mouth of a wolf.
