CURA.

What’s most striking in John Dilg paintings and drawings is the peculiar, somehow contradictory, mood they evoke. The recurring totemic pine-trees, the panettone mountains, and the waterfalls — of a certain mountain-like stillness — give a playful tone to the landscape they inhabit. They are made of repeating shapes which often transition from being a log to becoming a canyon, from water to mountain, valleys and even islands, and become the vocabulary of Dilg’s artworks. The subjects of the paintings and drawings find their origins in collected advertising images and souvenirs, as well as personal boyhood memories of the artist, who used to spend his summers in a family farm located in the American landscape of Iowa, in proximity to a creek. Their permeating amateurish-like flatness evokes that precious sense of wonder typical of childhood, while the hearty warm colours and soft light rather recall washed out polaroids and old memories that blur reality with fiction, moving into dreamy terrains or elderly forgetfulness. The combination of the two gives a surreal timelessness to the works, frozen into lonely views of quiet wilderness.

Is this same stillness, though, that brings into play a sense of eerie desolation. Take paintings such as Colorado or Help Me Remember, for example. Both have a mint green filter, perhaps given by the overscaled lunar light on the top of their compositions. If the former could appear as a tranquil night view of toxic notes, the latter feels rather odd in its depiction of an outcast slide in a dry land, between the desert and the lifeless. In other paintings such as Native Land or Nine-Mile Falls the greens are burned into beiges and oranges. All these palettes might be found in uncontaminated American landscape as well as within its exact opposite, being the colours of pollution often used in post-apocalyptic scenarios. A doubt arises: are we looking at untouched wildlands or wastelands rendered so by human activity? The human figure appears rarely and just as a shadow — perhaps suggesting a disintegrated present after an oblivious far away past. There is a jaguar lurking in two works. Their postcard-like composition as well as the unrealistic stiffness of the animal suggest its maculated fur might be of the colour of extinction. The moon is there again, warm and unbearable as a burning star in a nightmare where even the night has become stuffy, destined to vanish into eternal dawns.

Interestingly the text by Yuki Higashino, accompanying the exhibition, mentions a pervading sense of resignation, stating that “one cannot be sure if that is because Dilg is showing us the world recovering from a man-made catastrophe, or he is presenting an alternative state of the world that never experienced our destructiveness, the world that could have been but never was”. I think the key is to be found in the interest Dilg has for regeneration. One can observe this both within his artistic methodology, collecting man-made representations of nature and using these to generate shapes that keep recur and recycle, and within his chosen subjects. Eternal feels emblematic: here the canvas is occupied by perfectly cut gigantic logs, on top of which tiny young trees flourish. The trunks are wise mountains now and while man may be absent — no longer exploiter nor caretaker — the eyes of nature spark. The deforested landscape is alive, the “Planet on the Prairie” begins.