Submerged in the Painting of Luis Geraldes

                                                                                                                                  "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
                                                                                                                                                                               — Aristotle

Strong painting. Strong because of its impulses, its intense chromatics, its connection to a rudimentary ancestry that stretches from Africa to infinity, and that, despite its poetics and magic, its dramatic intensity and constant call for the inwardness of its registers, is not anthropocentric. One could say that here, man is called to share common universes and energies, elements that link him to space, to the quintessence, to the ether.

Do we carry all the worlds within us?

United with hybrid beings that are an integral part of a spiritual and aesthetic state, which contemplates the variation of life in this holistic conception of existence and possession, of sharing and integration, are we merely the reference that places us as potential agents of extemporaneous intergalactic dialogues? Or are all the citations simply used to promote new paths of gnosis? Is our planet a drifting Ark of Noah, or are we just another of many voices in the solitude of the universe?
Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Spirit. Foundations of the whole, portions of intimacy in the blending of secrets, or perhaps a response to the hesitations of understanding?

Possibility underpins the privileged theme in this series of paintings by Luis Geraldes. Viewed as an expressionist surrealism, the artist’s work nevertheless forces us into approaches that we would place in the realm of the most delirious hypotheses, as if the real, by its dimension and inaccessibility, were safe from complete definition. But, we say, there is also belief, speculation, the magical sense of phenomena yet to be explained, the pleasure of finding in the distant what is contested in the world as it presents itself to us, stripped of theories, hypotheses, or postulates.

I gaze at the painting and return to the Africa of legends, the root of sorrows and poetry, of humans who wear the skins of animals so that spirits may manage more and better what they could never touch with mere physical strength. I look, and once again I feel that, being another, I equal myself through effort, through pain, or through the need to be and to prevail alongside those who dwell in other dimensions of Space, in other places of the absurd or of mystery.