Beto Gayoso in his studio

Photo: Courtesy of Beto Gayoso

Esto no tiene nombre - This has no name

"Nature, looking for a formula that could satisfy everyone, finally chose death, which, unsurprisingly, has not satisfied anyone."

(Émile Cioran)

Sometimes the act of moving away is a movement that brings us closer to what we are immersed in. That is, to be able to see clearly it takes distance, to find some summit on the way where we can see (see each other) from a new point of view or, in any case, from a place where we can understand our happening, our ideas, creations, etc. Clarity doesn't come from one moment to the next (and in committed artistic work, it may never come; and maybe that will play for it). So, probably time here has a significant relevance, right?

Beto Gayoso is an active Peruvian painter. And the activity in painting (as well as in any other trade) is related to movement and production. An active painter is one who works, perhaps the one who builds and feeds - beyond a personal language - constancy. Beto has known (and happily continues to do so) to understand that constancy has to do with a decision. He continues to answer, then, the same question he questions about artistic work and what haunts him: necessity.

In the words of the painter: "the sorrow settles in the soul, and a way of externalizing it (at least to understand it, since then it always comes back like a dagger to tell us that it is and will be a part of life) is through the act of painting." When I consider that the painter understands that constancy responds to a necessary act (to a painful decision, indeed), I mean that he has succeeded, or is on track and ready, to assume a role. Beto paints to know how to be, almost to endure (or save himself, which Cioran would fully understand).

Beto's trajectory begins with color (in that wild freedom with which any child is ready to play, there the questions are usually so great that they may be projected for the future). But what if that child, which we've all been, decides to go on. It is the case of Gayoso. Therefore, in that journey, there are sculptural pieces, installations, relationships with space, heartbreaking materials, and, under all that skin, extraordinary humor inherited from his mother. And this last line may respond to that grief that is now an engine for your work.

All those previous experiences, processes, discoveries, and, without a doubt, many mistakes for which he is grateful, have built the internal methodology with which the painter returns to color, as as a child, serious in his game, but now in solitude. Colored candles that reflect perhaps that labyrinth of emotions or states of mind with which it arrives at the workshop, lines that draw and blur contours in a swing that ends only in another painting and, suddenly now, a lightness (perhaps a kinder future) in that incandescent color that he once knew.

His painting resists. It builds a kind of trench in times where there is almost no record of what happens because the waves of information end up drowning all before. It then leaves footprints, traces, layers, accumulations (not only visible) that allow you to return in time (a brush and an archaeologist). There is no painting he has not lived, and yet they are also readings for the future. At what point can we talk about maturity?

Andrés Pérez González