{"id":103,"date":"2018-07-20T06:55:15","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T06:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/?p=103"},"modified":"2022-10-08T17:40:06","modified_gmt":"2022-10-08T17:40:06","slug":"the-surreal-paintings-of-vidal-alcolea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/the-surreal-paintings-of-vidal-alcolea\/","title":{"rendered":"THE SURREAL PAINTINGS OF VIDAL ALCOLEA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

THE SURREAL PAINTINGS OF VIDAL ALCOLEA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The surreal paintings of Vidal Alcolea<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Excerpt from Original Story \/ Post by Ray Parker at Ray Parker Photo<\/a> on July 09, 2018<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"vidal
Vidal Alcolea, Artist, Toronto, 1987<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cWhen will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers?<\/em>
I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself to the dreamers \u2026\u201d<\/em> Manifesto of Surrealism<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The birth of Surrealism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In my teens, I discovered Salvador Dali. His work \u2014 paintings, sculpture, and collaborations with photographers \u2014 spoke to me like no other art. Soon, I discovered his contemporaries, members of the Surrealist \u201cCentrale\u201d that included photographers Andr\u00e9 Kert\u00e9sz, Brassa\u012b, and Man Ray. I was particularly taken with the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Ren\u00e9 Magritte, Paul Delvaux, and Andr\u00e9 Bretton, the acclaimed \u201cfather\u201d of Surrealism. Their manifesto accorded with my views conceptually  \u2014 I\u2019d been devouring the writings of Freud and Jung \u2014 but also on a more visceral level, because I\u2019d always had a rich dream life, with enough colliding symbolic debris to keep a depth psychologist busy for years. As it was, I busied myself turning subconscious dream material into poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unexpected<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I found kindred spirits in Vancouver poetry circles, meeting in decrepit pubs and bohemian coffee houses in the Downtown Eastside, rubbing elbows with alumni and faculty of the University of B.C.\u2019s Creative Writing Department \u2026 pretty heady stuff for a kid who just scraped through high school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a sort of consolation prize for my otherwise lacklustre performance in grade 12, I was presented at graduation (a ceremony I did not attend) with a book store gift certificate in the amount of $15.00 \u201cfor creative work in English,\u201d the only subject at which I excelled. I put it towards a book I\u2019d been coveting for some time:  the sumptuous hardcover, Dali,<\/em> published by Abrams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melmoth Group<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Prior to my journey by bus to Toronto, I\u2019d been hanging out with Vancouver\u2019s neo-surrealists, the Melmoth Group that included father and son artists Ladislav and Martin Guderna, Lori-Ann Latremouille, Ed Varney, Sheri-D. Wilson, Gregg Simpson, and poet Michael Bullock, for whose Surrealist novel, The Story of Noire, <\/em>I provided a cover illustration and author\u2019s portrait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Days of wine and Clovis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOnce there used to be many people<\/em>
sitting around the cafe table drinking and smoking<\/em>
and talking all kinds of nonsense.<\/em>
It was good.<\/em>
It was beautiful.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>

~ Vidal Alcolea, I Will Drink No More Forever<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I came upon Vidal Alcolea\u2019s work in the Ruby-Fiorino Gallery while exploring my new neighbourhood, after moving across town, from Christie Pits<\/a> to Queen Street West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I saw in Alcolea\u2019s large paintings \u201cof the grotesque and the arabesque,\u201d intended or not, something of Trouille\u2019s  disquieting provocation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vidal and I sat in a room behind the gallery, drinking wine. I vividly recall the filtered light pouring through the window in the small, cluttered office. He insisted I attend the opening, where more wine and animated conversation was shared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t know if Vidal considers this period of his work to be in the Surrealist tradition (his later work<\/a>, I\u2019d say, is more impressionistic) but they certainly evoked a sense of dreamlike fantasy, from the whimsical to the nightmarish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Spanish-Canadian artist was also an established playwright with a couple of Toronto productions to his credit when I met him. As we see, he has penned some moving poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met several more times at Queen Street bars, sharing philosophical and political views and goodness knows what other kind of nonsense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was very good indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lost years<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I lost track of Vidal and his work after I left Toronto, until three-years-ago I discovered an Internet trail: auction records for some of his canvases and personal blog entries, including his \u201cPoetry on Dialysis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the same way that social media synchronicity\u00a0has reconnected me with other long-lost friends, sharing my photo on social media\u00a0accompanied by the complete poem quoted here led to a reunion of\u00a0sorts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Except Vidal had stumbled on the Instagram post and, regrettably, thought comments there, complementary of my portrait and Vidal\u2019s poem, indicated people assumed he\u2019d slipped off this mortal coil. He wanted me to know that, despite health struggles, he was very much alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I apologized for the misunderstanding, and in the rapprochement via Messenger we agreed it was nice to reconnect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The persistence of memory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Some dreams are so convincingly \u201creal\u201d that the transition to waking life is tentative. I have a recurring dream that I\u2019ve returned to high school as an adult to complete the subjects I failed. My subconscious has gathered around the story such a constellation of alternate chapters, so to speak, that the fear I\u2019m going to miss class persists right through morning ablutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirty years on, my Toronto memories feel like that \u2014 a persistent, lucid dream. Were it not for these artifacts and confirmations from old friends that yes, we did do all that crazy shit, I might believe it all a figment of my imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2026 all that does not spring from tradition is plagiarism.\u201d<\/em> ~Dali<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Original Story \/ Post by Ray Parker at Ray Parker Photo<\/a> on July 09, 2018 \/ Edited by Naccarato on October 4, 2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE SURREAL PAINTINGS OF VIDAL ALCOLEA The surreal paintings of Vidal Alcolea Excerpt from Original Story \/ Post by Ray Parker at Ray Parker Photo …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":174,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,16],"tags":[17,18,19],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-reviews","tag-articles","tag-reviews","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naccarato.org\/Vidal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}