Concept

Pablo Díaz-Carballo is an international artist who works on contemporary art research projects. His painting gave rise to a Conceptual Art proposal that was converted through the Expanded Concept of Art into a cultural work of art, parallel and complementary to his painting.

With Kazimir Malevich and Lucio Fontana the end of Academic Painting as it had been understood until then was declared.

With Malevich’s work, a white square on a white background; and with the cuts of the canvas of Fontana on the neutral canvas, the “end” of the painting was marked. That is to say, all the possibilities and combinations of the elements of expression had been studied, perspective, analysis, interaction, variables, tensions, harmony, composition, color had been resolved.

Then suddenly the door to conceptual art opened.

For Pablo Díaz-Carballo, even today, painting is a key reference that he would resort to again and again to solve problems of conceptual art, and is the fundamental and main activity of his that makes him interact with his work of conceptual art.

The Work of Cultural Art of Pablo Díaz-Carballo emerged from Painting to Conceptual Art. It is the idea-metaphor of the House of the Mind that was developed in space and time through fine arts, social sciences, technology and innovation in educational methodology.

The Expanded Concept of Art can be transformed into a Work of Cultural Art, which is an organic and intangible work of art, which is evidenced through the artist’s proposal, the projects and the tangible results that he obtained. Today this historical work will be shown in a Museum of Contemporary Art.

Pablo Díaz-Carballo started from his painting with the metaphor of The House of the Mind, and in Conceptual Art with the question: What is Art? In this way he interacted with his painting and developed this concept beyond his art study.

The result was his Cultural Work (La Buena Gripe & IDEO ARTE) that impacted more than 4,620 students and indirectly more than 15,000 people.

The cultural artwork of Pablo Díaz-Carballo was at the same time the source that inspired the development and feedback of his painting during that period, and both have developed in parallel movement since 1999.

He currently continues to work on new paintings related to this process, in such a way that this work of Cultural Art became a painting again. The painting remains the basis for all of his artwork.

Arelis Díaz has been working with him for 23 years as the manager of these projects.

“Plastic process of the concept” 40 x 26″ acrylic on canvas, 2020. This work was made with the original documents used by Arelis, from the management of IDEO ARTE, and represents a timeline of one of the projects with its development milestones.

Pablo Diaz Carballo has been a professional contemporary artist since 1999, a cultural activist since 1980-83, and one protagonist of the punk-rock movement in Caracas, consisting of artists, filmmakers, poets, graphic designers, and other political activists.

In less than a year the movement was infiltrated by socialists, communists and neo-nazis, with which Pablo Díaz withdrew from the movement. Although they did not have a political ideology, they fought for human rights, justice, demanding high quality in the education, against political corruption and for economic freedom, so the arts and music was the best way to do it.

To understand the meaning of activism it is necessary to understand that if you want to change the system you do not have to burn the city; you must be more creative that the system and contribute values so that you can make changes.

Pablo Díaz Carballo carried out parallel studies to his artistic career. He studied two years of visual arts, at a technical level, and then five years until he obtained a degree in art, mention in painting.

While studying arts, in parallel, he studied other complementary disciplines: he did three years of history at the university, there he studied anthropology, sociology, philosophy. He also took three years of classical piano and drums, graphic design, among other complementary courses to his artistic career.

All this previous knowledge was very useful to define his conceptual art proposal and later for the development of his cultural work.

He graduated in painting, cum laude, in 1999 where he began his professional art career, with the support of Arelis Diaz as project manager.

Marcel Duchamp: In conceptual art, the limits of the definition of art disappear. – The concept becomes more important on technique and trade. – The concept of the work of art is no longer conditioned to formal or expressive criteria. – Any object can be submitted to the interpretation of the artist. – Any object can be turned into a work of art. -The artist has absolute freedom and authority to decide what is art. – Sculpture and painting lose their autonomy. – The line that differentiates painting from sculpture disappears. – The work of art is made integral and can contain any plastic element according to the concept of the work.s.

In 1994, the conceptual art project originated from Pablo’s first paintings, in which he represented the metaphor of “The House of the Mind”. He continues developing this metaphor through his career, current paintings, and projects.

Pablo Diaz Carballo – Arte conceptual – Instalación – Oleo sobre MDF y lámina de acrílico sobre la pintura para producir una imagen difusa – Audio del análisis de los críticos de arte que miraron el cuadro antes de ser velado por la lámina de acrílico. 

As Pablo Diaz painted, he dubbed the concept from which his images emerged “The House of the Inner Being” or “The House of the Mind”. Pablo’s concepts explore the state of man’s inner being, particularly his mental and spiritual condition. He represents these ideas in his paintings by using as metaphors the images of lights and shadows, the architecture, the house, the window, the door and structures under construction. 

Pablo Diaz’s creations invite the spectator into a visual, auditive, or audiovisual experience, leading the spectator to analyze and mentally complete his experience of the work of art. 

GALLERY

Diaz Mancini Gallery

Performance, artworks, and exhibition in the art gallery in La Castellana, Caracas 1999.

JB MUSEUM

JACOBO BORGES MUSEUM

Pablo applied culture as an “antivirus” system for individuals with “sociocultural disorders”. Caracas, 1999.

TFC MUSEUM

TULIO FEBRES CORDERO 

Pablo Diaz – Paintings and Expanded Concept of Arts, Solo Art show. Merida, 2000.

The Expansion of Creative Consciousness through the Fine Arts.

The Expanded Concept of Art proposes that the arts should go beyond the simple production of art pieces as purely decorative objects, to become a proposition that intellectually challenges the spectator. From these premises of contemporary art, we find insight into the work of Pablo Diaz Carballo.

With contemporary art, the artist not only creates the sculpture or painting, but he focuses on molding the mind of the spectator by using the resources of conceptual art.

Through his painting or sculpture, the artist challenges the spectator to consider a theme; the piece of art becomes complementary to that theme, such as the depiction “One and Three Chairs” from Joseph Kosuth. Conceptual art is closer to philosophy than other artistic disciplines. 

During an art workshop, while drawing a tree outdoors, and thanks to the drawing exercise, Pablo Díaz had the visual experience of contemplating the presence of the tree as he had never understood it before.

Pablo had learned to look at things at school through the concept, in this case, the concept of “tree” but he had not previously experienced the real contemplation and phenomenology of the tree as a living being, presence, etc.

So the training of the look with the drawing revealed another reality, another way of looking at things, in this case the look trained to draw a tree.

Pablo understood that due to the lack of such experiences during his school years, he then saw the tree only through the concept, but not through his visual presence.

Therefore, to achieve substantial changes in the “House of the Mind” of other people, the experiences of the arts are pre-eminent in the expansion and development of creative thinking.

Marcel Duchamp: Arte Conceptual. Andy Warhol: producción en serie y masificación de la producción de la obra de arte. Joseph Kosuth: Concepto, imagen y experiencia del objeto.

References and influences from master artists

Giotto, Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt – Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth, Jackson Pollock.

Regarding the Expanded Concept of Arts, Joseph Beuys affirmed that arts should emerge from museums and exhibition halls to become part of day to day life. Arts are a fundamental catalyst of moral, political and economical changes in men due to the artistic concept being primarily of anthropological character. 

Arts are essential for the development of creative thought and innovation, and therefore essential for the development of the country. Why then are arts considered to be subjects of such little importance in education? Thus, to teach arts, it is necessary to teach not only the concept but more importantly, the experiences of art. 

Pablo Diaz was an active member of a branch of punk rockers, consisting of young artists, musicians, and cinematographers – most of them from Catholic schools. They felt furious and helpless as they observed how politicians established a system of corruption that had been slowly destroying Venezuela since 1960, subjecting the majority of the population to terrible injustices and human rights violations. Pablo desired to do something to produce substantial changes against this reality.

So he kept the intention of doing something that would produce a shock change against this terrible reality, in an oil country rich in natural resources, which was considered the Switzerland of Spanish America.

Pablo Diaz had personally experienced the mediocrity of the art programs in his school. He knew that children have the capacity to develop their skills through creative thinking, particularly those considered of “bad behavior”, but the schools gave pride of place to sciences and sports.

This culture in the school system ignored the vocation of artistic students, whereas it should have promoted the importance of artistic and musical disciplines alongside the other subjects. The system of education should have offered opportunities to those artistic students which the socialist system of education had been denying to them for decades. 

By combining the concept of the House of the Being with the Expanded Concept of Arts and the principles developed by Andy Warhol, Pablo developed a system to bring artistic programs to the masses. His programs of art and music contributed important changes to the system of elementary education in Venezuela, benefiting nearly 4,620 students and their families.

In this way, Pablo Diaz achieved his objective by inverting the primitive and violent concept of the punk rock movement, accomplishing substantial changes in the system of education over the course of fifteen years through the stunningly high quality of his artistic programs. 

 

 During those years he produced and exhibited forty-two paintings related to this process of conceptual art, using oil or acrylic paint on polyptych wooden pieces.

Pablo Diaz worked with Arelis Diaz to form Ideo Arte, his own conceptual art lab that culturally impacted thousands of students.

The new architecture of the House of the Inner Being implied the application of the Expanded Concept of Arts to develop music, arts, and audiovisual programs – like architects or engineers do with their projects, or like Jackson Pollock as he did not touch the canvas with his paintbrush.

Arts are taught at school, but not really from conceptual art. Pablo Diaz managed to transmit the biochemical energy of his ideas through the resources that he used – in this case, strategies to change the comprehension of the historical question “What is art?”, to change the way Arts are known. Thus, thinking about the factories of Andy Warhol, Pablo Diaz and his wife hired a group of artists and musicians to apply his programs on a large scale.

Over the course of twenty years, Pablo developed his work of conceptual art in the minds of the children, in the mind of the teachers, of the families, of the community, and of the artists that participated in his programs. 

Pablo and Arelis Diaz created all the needed strategies and methodologies to demolish prejudices, opening windows and doors as ways of accessing experiences to modify the “design of the House of the Inner Being” until reaching the objectives of the Conceptual Art: the modeling of the conscience, modifying the walls of the conscience in relation to what was understood as the Arts in basic education. 

Almost five thousand children benefited from the visual arts and music programs. The premises of the problem were also proven at the international level, when three hundred more children in Willemstad, a Dutch province in the Caribbean, received these programs.

The entirety of Pablo Diaz’ creative process with Ideo Arte lasted twenty years, and from it were produced the images that Pablo Diaz is processing in his art studio. Thus the circle was completed; from the first metaphors in his paintings, to Conceptual Art, to the Expanded Concept of Arts, all of this comes back to the study of the artist to be worked on currently.

Pablo Diaz Carballo’s story is about an artistic process that started from paintings and grew into an exploration of conceptual art and the expanded concept of art, from which Pablo Diaz obtained results from graphical archeology of Ideo Arte, his Cultural Work of Art.

This database of images is the source that inspired him to return to his art studio to resume his painting in new projects of conceptual art.