Oriol Espinal

Oriol Espinal - Drachenspur

Técnica: Mixed technique on Japanese paper

Biografía del Artista:

From the most primitive cultures to the present day, the figure of the dragon - Drache in German - has been a universal symbol that has survived in the East and the West, embodying the myth of the monster and the representation of the devil, but also the image of the animal or that which is animal in ourselves. With the name Drache Oriol Espinal has given title to the set of his latest works - let's say dragon sculptures or objects - arising from the voice of silence, from the war cry that the artist has uttered during the solitary combat fought in the shelter of his interior. And we can say that Oriol Espinal has passed the test, like Siegfried, Perseus, Apollo and the solar gods who defeat the dragon to become heroes. Just like the hero, the artist is permanently engaged in a struggle with art. For this reason, all of Oriol Espinal's works inspired by this symbolic combat against the dragon are objects related to this conflict: steles, shields, trophies, ritual objects, etc. In other words, the artist as a gladiator wrapped in the tools of art, alone facing the beast, alone facing himself. As a metaphor for this combat, the artist has taken the dragon's skin, its rough surface of scales as a symbol and invokes the dragon and the mythical heroes who have defeated it. In this way, with this patient and daily struggle, he becomes a poet of ritual time for the preparations for combat, riveting one by one the lead scales of the monster that lives within us. Drachenberg is the setting for a combat, the monument dedicated to the dragon Fafner, whose heart was swallowed by the hero Sigurdh, who will thus enable the soul and wisdom of the defeated to revive in that of the victor. This kind of monument keeps the sleeping dragon-serpent in an elevated urn just before the combat. Related to Fafner, we also have the Drachenwunde, which is the door to death and the door to rebirth, a metaphor for the struggle of the new man against the old man, the same one that the artist has just carried out with his own past, which he conquers even at the cost of a certain degree of self-immolation. This process of regeneration is explained very well by Franco Cardini when he says that the hero certainly knows that facing his dragon means fighting against himself, committing suicide as an old man to re-emerge as a new man. Another series of works in this exhibition, more objectual, are those entitled Hero's Trophy, which take the dragon's skin as a fundamental element of their composition. Of note are the Disk for a Ceremony, where the qualities of the hero are invoked (audacity, mystery, skill, pain, criticism, humour, wit, wisdom, madness, solitude, patience), the Object for a Ritual, the Stele for the Augur or the Scale-Shield. In this whole body of work, Oriol Espinal invokes opposing spirits in a war without truce and without possible pacts: life and death, old and new, god and devil, angel and demon, light and darkness, art and non-art. The idea of ​​regeneration, of resurgence of oneself, but not from the ashes, but from the act of devouring alive the heart of the dragon that nests in our entrails.