The one that comes close is the bull
Jose Tomas
THERE IS a twilight air to bullfighting. In an afternoon of bullfighting, the fragility of an ancient world is perceived, the tenacity that is typical of all ritual and romantic resistance. The “this will end” thus coexists, intimately, with that other commotion typical of the bullfighting visionary, the one who accidentally says “this is eternal”. An afternoon of bullfighting, it is true, is an event increasingly disengaged from social use, from current morality, but it is also true that this lack of connection to the secular culture of shows is today, in turn, the essential value of bullfighting as a kind of gold standard of truth in the artistic sphere. Wherever the notion of art and of the artist is blurred, in its transcendental sense, the bullfight guards the primary nature of the game, of the symbol and of the festival; the balance between office and inspiration, the tradition of knowledge and the sacramental, sacrificial and subversive notion of the beautiful. The formal hermeticism, the educating immorality of bullfighting, distances it from committed art, that is, from that surrendering and ultimately always conservative conformity, from the artist who says himself at the service of the cause, from propagandist degeneration, in short. The discourse of bullfighting is a closed discourse, it only belongs to art, and that is why there is always something pathetic in the bullfighter who raises his cap with ideological sophistry and something of vile desecration in the political faction that usures the rite in own benefit.
In that hermetic of the purely artistic, in the closing of his work, José Tomás has been installed for twenty-five stubborn years, who is an enlightened bullfighter, but who is, above all, the great living enigma of Spanish art. The commotion, the revelation of Tomás in bullfighting, that stroke of geometry and silence that began a quarter of a century ago, long ago transcended the sphere of bullfighting and is now an event. In a prophetic escape from the narcissistic and cosmetic doggy of the digital novelty, Tomás soon opted for the Russian Nazarin beard, knowing that in the agrarian truth of art there is a cosmopolitan truth, that only in that complete confinement can he The artist completely outsmart the tribe’s philanthropic ogre, the last tyranny of algorithm, the sycophantic spittle of the public and the eye of the censor. Tomás preaches, long before stepping on any albero and in the strict margins of silence, a primary and subversive artistic code: not explaining oneself, not exclaiming, not twisting, not lying, knowing how to leave, knowing how to lose, knowing how to return, knowing how not to be, offering questions and not answers, learn the capital difference between advertising and showing up. His artistic figure, irredeemable Nietzschean, never transmits the happiness of triumph, the unctuous drunkenness of the prize, but the serene happiness of those who find and assume their duty to themselves and to their own lives. José Tomás is thus champion of an understanding of art as an honest bodily and ethical consecration to the truth and its beauty. Only in the narrowness of a strictly canonized art, in the closed forms of bullfighting, and under the non-negotiable presence of the grim reaper, could an artist like Tomás appear, who sublimates his tradition, always stepping on fire, making daily obligation impossible. . But it is in this atavism of his being a bullfighter, through the ancestral art of fighting bulls, that Tomás today transcends the world of the bull and his own meaning in the Fiesta, to affirm himself as a disturbing genius of the art world. Any artistic account of Spain in these five decades would be apocryphal without paying attention to that right-hander from Galapagar who had no other publicity than to upset order and the concert through aesthetic emotion.
Bullfighting is an art that being is gone. When that other disturbing artist stretched out his head to a clay pigeon, there he left us the pigeon for the remains. There is, however, in the bullfighter’s work a tyranny of transience that is also melancholic tyrannical in whoever sees it. There is a tremor in an afternoon of bullfighting that does not admit technical reproduction but rather nostalgia for what we desperately dream of solid and lasting. And we always wonder, in front of the already worn photo of the teacher, in that adolescent afternoon that changed us all, if we will once again be before the artist in a happy walk. However, it is in that moment of uncertainty when one understands the enigmatic company of the poetic hero, his living nature, and that it was not he who transformed the work, but his work that anointed him as an epic presence, a loyal supporter of our humble adventure.
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