GIORGIO CELIN - EL BOLERO FUE MI RUINA

Giorgio Celin's profound interest in Bolero provides the starting point for many of his works. Bolero music is a genre of love song that originated in Cuba in the 19th century. It was then in the 1940s by predominately Mexican composers, that the music took on its most infamous form - gaining great notoriety across Spanish-speaking counties. The lyrics deal with romance, passion, calamitous and bittersweet love. Expressly, it is the drama that accompanies the narrative that Celin is fascinated by.  Another reference point for Celin is the Puerto Rican theatre production ‘El bolero fue mi ruina’ which is inspired by the novel ‘Loca de la locura’. The novel is centered around ‘Loca’, an aging, male-born, female-identifying protagonist who murdered their lover, and is now contemplating their final days in the jail of ‘Oso Blanco’.

Ideas around identity and fulfillment are fundamental to the dramatisation that also connects with poignant and existential sentiment. Celin identifies these themes in Bolero too, describing the genre as ‘very queer music that presents an androgynous voice’. Often consisting of deep vocals belonging to a female singer, or an ethereal almost angelic voice owned by a male (take for example, Bola de Nieve, the Cuban singer-pianist and songwriter, b. 1911). There is an impossible desire within Bolero music; a longing for the object of love, the ambiguity between me and you, agamic (asexual) interactions or intense physical passions.

This series of works present fictional characters from the Latinx Diaspora, chronicling a period over time; falling in love in Berlin, breaking up in Tel Aviv, dancing to a sad rhythm by the Barceloneta beach, drinking away the pain in a bar in the Raval (Spanish) neighbourhood and contemplating relationships in front of a glass of vino tinto. Specifically, in ‘The Yellow Train’, one of the characters is struck by a music-related recollection that revives memory of a past lover - even though he is engrossed in a typical, busy day. One can understand the nature of music to initiate powerful emotion and resonance beyond the everyday. There is a strong autobiographical connection in each of the paintings and as Celin notes ‘everything is a self-portrait’. The city of Barcelona also encourages this notion, the place where Celin resides, paints from, and most strongly witnesses the many forms that the Latinx Diaspora takes.