Invention of memories. A gallery of four paintings and something more
Childhood stayed in one afternoon, the day he walked an orange street with his mother, and he knew that people traveled to the United States in search of happiness. It was the day he saw his father leave on an old mountain motorcycle, with a small briefcase on his back, a hand out in farewell, and a silhouette that blurred with the air. It was a drizzly morning.
Life seemed then a long dream, and the world was nothing but the walls, patios, animals and plants of the family home; a modest little cottage made of adobe, clay tiles and wooden doors, where he and his family had made their home in the Honduran mountains, "far from the madding crowd." He was happy as a child, as much as a little boy in a modest house in a rural country could be.
But that is a house from the past. The walls crack, and the patios forget that the hummingbirds fluttered over the old bougainvillea that is still full of flowers. They are all gone, except for the sea of memories and that first drawing - naive like him - that still clings to the door as unrestricted proof of a distant life. The memory of theirs is present. The evocation arrives.
Suddenly everything is clear: childhood is now and the family home is full. Her father has brought television and everyone in the village has come to watch it. It's a small fourteen-inch black-and-white screen that works with an antenna and a manual knob. Sometimes, to change channels, you need pliers. And it is true that in the rest of the world that is a device of the past, but in a house like yours, it is a novelty, and it is also an innocent way of being together.
Then it's a cold afternoon. The trees are nested in the sky, and mom has come for him to the "José Arcadio Pineda" school (where he attends); He has freed him from the heavy school bag, he has taken him by the hand and they have left together for the same orange street, full of mud, where they always travel to reach the hill where the house is. As they advance, a thin and soft shadow is left behind them ...
Then there is the image of grandfather Sebastián. He is a quiet man, a good Christian, and not too old to be his grandfather. He has a deep gaze and works in his wood workshop. Bring a meter to your belt, a marking pencil over your right ear, and weathered clothing full of Dust, Resistol, and Pitch. He exercises the office of the wise, and before working on them, he speaks to the trees.
The workshop is silent. No noise from machines, hammers, or sandpaper. But he and his sisters - who have gone to visit the grandfather - run all over his corners; playing, screaming, and leaving footprints on the floor, where the sawdust intermingled with the dust, forms thick mattresses with the remains of wood.
He already seems to jump on those old mattresses. It seems to you that you suddenly feel the indescribable aroma of fresh wood, of the smells of the kitchen on a cold night, of the earth, wet some rainy afternoon, of wildflowers in the humid fields.
All those memories amaze him. They come back to his head like old spies in his life, like adorable intruders from a hazy and fickle past. Perhaps memories are nothing more than an invention - as De Quincey said - an impossibility of desire. Because some memories are capable of distorting the past, of transforming time and memory.
Now he, an unjustly grown child, is an inventor of memories; a painter of childhood and memory, a poet of color whose work is full of him; a nostalgic escapist for whom - according to the idea of Isaiah Berlin - everything that happened is more beautiful than the reality of the present.
His paintings are memories of the moment, slightly insinuated memories, words that come from the silence itself and emerge, deeply, like water from the water at the bottom of the earth. They are stealthy witnesses, photographs that tell dear, longed for episodes; successions of images about the transparency of naivety, the mystery of childhood, and nostalgia for life possible in another time.
His work is a fractional mural where the inapparent and every day come to life. Its protagonists are rural people, rural landscapes, scenes of a Honduran life sometimes painful, sometimes sad; stories that tell the whole geography of a country.
Let's imagine this gallery:
First frame: Here is a woman sitting. She is a young woman of modest appearance and indigenous features. She wears her hair down and a colorful dress. In his abdomen, there is a growing son. She protects him, contemplates him, caresses him. And he would hardly be distinguished, but he has a sad face; it can be guessed by the corners of his mouth and the half-sunken sockets of his eyes. Behind, like a guardian, is a shadow, perhaps as a witness to time and things.
Table two: Somewhere in Honduras there are two taciturn children. Perhaps two children who rest from daily work during the coffee season in some town in Lempira. The oldest is seated, and the smallest sleeps on the chest of the largest. The older one - who supports his back against an imaginary wall and helps himself with his right arm to support the weight of the other - rests his forehead on the sleeper's forehead, in a loving and tender image. No one knows where they are, how they are, or were, but it seems that both are cold. It also gives the impression that there is genuine love between them.
Third frame: He is a boy who makes noise with his mouth and plays with his hands on the laundry in the patio, where Mom has squatted him, has soaped his fragile little body, and massages his head in foamy circles. To clean it all, Mum, who is on her back with her hair in a bun, pours clear water on her head, almost as if hoping to wash more than her body: the water also cleanses the soul.
Final painting: A mother hugs two of her children. Next to them, two men watch the embrace with expressionless and blurred faces. At some point, they are all surrounded by a fence made of men with weapons, armor, and traps; wall-men who do not allow them to continue their journey: they are a family of migrants, one of the thousands who join the caravans that leave Honduras fleeing horror and hunger.
Perhaps in painting this scene, he has remembered himself as that sad and moved child who saw his father leave one rainy morning for the same destination, with the same pain and the same certainty of forgetfulness, farewell, and loss. A whole life seems to fit in only memory, in a single image, in a single painting.
Cristian Gavarrete paints life stories about life itself, universes of color, and a recovered house. To live and breathe in them, it has been necessary to live and breathe memories, because deep down we are all made of memories, of things that are carried, more in the heart than in the memory.
These arts are collected from