"IN SEARCH OF WATER MIRRORS" by Antonio Iturbe (2021)

Literature and painting share their impossible dream of stopping time. Writers try to halt the moment by capturing the present scene, which will soon become the past, and fixing it on the pages of a book. Painters attempt to freeze light, capturing in the painting a precise instant where all the glimmers of a perpetually moving, impossible present are held before they slip through their fingers.

Painter Carlos Díaz has spent years wandering the city, rescuing bicycles briefly propped against a Barcelona façade, New York taxis blurring in their transience, or laundry swaying for an instant on balconies. And he has taken on an even greater challenge: adding to his collection of preserved butterflies the reflection of buildings, trees, or the sunset itself on the surface of rain puddles.

A puddle is a mirror that one can step through. Literature has been fascinated by liquid mirrors. Greek mythology tells us that Narcissus was so enamored with his beauty that he callously rejected the nymph Echo and eventually fell in love with himself. When he saw his image reflected in the surface of a pond, he threw himself into it and drowned. A similar desire for reflection is attributed to the legend of the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Bai, who, while drunkenly rowing on a lake at night, saw the moon's reflection on the water and leaped to embrace it, with fatal consequences. Other sources claim he died due to excessive mercury intake from elixirs meant to grant immortality.

Embracing one's reflection and passing through the mirror are part of the never-ending quest of writers and painters. Lewis Carroll's 1871 sequel to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There." The restless Alice decides to step through the looking glass and finds herself in a world of living chess pieces and talking flowers, where it's hard to determine what's real and what's a dream. Jorge Luis Borges knew much about mirrors: he was fascinated and terrified by them, inviting us to peer into infinity by simply facing two mirrors.

Carlos Díaz follows in that tradition of reflection chasers. His paintings show us a reality that shimmers on the surface, silhouettes that exist and don't, a reality much more porous than what we call real, but precisely because of its tremor and vulnerability, much truer. Those hypnotic images he presents of an ephemeral world trembling on the surface of a puddle tell us much about ourselves and make us tremble. There are astonishing paintings, created in a state of grace, that overwhelm you with their miraculous quality: the moment that will remain before our eyes because it has been captured in the amber drop of the canvas.

Visiting Carlos Díaz's studio in the city of Vic, you realize that the paintings observe us with the same intensity that we observe them. "I see something in the reflections that compels me to construct that reality. I paint what I see and what moves me," he says. He talks about the importance of looking down, of observing the underside of reality, the weight of the air. Above all, he is concerned with "the truth of the painting, because that's where its beauty lies." He lies on the floor to contemplate a painting hung on the wall at his eye level, as if the painting were a puddle on the sidewalk, and up close we see the marks of the oil, the scraping of the palette knife, the materiality of the immaterial, because that's what it means to be a painter. He believes that "a painting guides you, there's a struggle of forces to see who can prevail, whether it's you or the painting, because there's a moment when it acquires its identity... these are intimate things that are hard to explain. They reside in feelings."