Don Gregorio Antón
T H E R I T U A L S o f D O N G R E G O R I O A N T Ó N
by P a u l L a R o s a
an excerpt from Strange Genius, 21st - The Journal of Contemporary Photography
To view the widely praised and widely exhibited work of Don Gregorio Antón is to bear witness to an intensely personal vision, immersive and in-the-raw. It seems more compelled than devised, conjuring a world both strange and familiar, enclosed and internal yet reverberating outward. We are riveted by these photographs as we might suddenly catch a stranger in a moment of self-reflection, caressing an exposed limb or talking out loud or shedding a tear alone in public. In times like these, we glimpse ourselves in others, acknowledge common pains and desires and fugitive thoughts. This is the hidden, introspective terrain Antón explores and records, and in which we in turn, halt, and find ourselves reflected.
We know that photography can be a portal to truths, that it has the power to change our perception, to inspirit and instill a sense of beauty, to shift thought and provoke feeling–and to create some magic. And time and again in Antón’s work we open our eyes to magic and mystery and turn inward in thought. We recognize in him an ability to capture and define our world on the peripheries of his own, to forge a path for us through the wilderness and encourage us to find our way back out. But he is no shaman, neither alchemist nor master of riddles, and the imagery is not all fire and brimstone. He is more the voice within that beckons, “I want to understand; I long to know.” And a forward reaching hope triumphs in the process. It’s perhaps telling that his most poignant and hopeful photo, May You Not Be Frightened, is also his simplest. The figures are clothed and clearly human, the setting realistic, the message basic and clear. A young boy sits in a chair, head despondently bent toward the earth. Behind him Antón stands emerging from the darkness of a damp cell, obscured and disembodied. Above his head a halo hovers, and in his outstretched palms the Holy Spirit rests in silent offering to the boy. Surely he will taste the rules of tragedy, if he has not already; perhaps for him too a moment of play will lead to death. But Antón arrives as the vigilant keeper of the flame, the bearer of blessings and wisdom, bestowing solace and brotherhood, and a sense that all is not lost, that belief can help guard against the trial of hurts and fears to come. The image is essentially the visual equivalent of a kiss.
Antón’s visionary and spiritual work charts an imaginative inner journey towards a common experience and belief that unites us all. It is first and foremost emotional photography, nuanced and replete with feeling, speculative yet decisive. Even at its most graphic and pleading, it retains an aura of hope, of necessity and reply. There are no smiles, but there are also no tears or trembles, and the body, even postured in death, never seems entombed. The work may be submerged in the personal, but it skirts self-absorption; no oblique strategies surface, no nebulous networks of vague signals. Instead, Antón seamlessly devises his world in devotional symbols that inspire hope and healing–enfolding arms and open palms, embryonic forms, winds of change and flames descending from the heavens–and conceives the body not as some heavy parish trapped in the boondocks of the world, but pure and naked in the light of day, in the clear and present reality of human understanding. His art represents curiosity and acceptance, a blameless embrace of a life both splendid and perilous, shot through with beauty and vicissitude. It sounds the Angelus. This is the final impression of Antón’s work–a sanctifying view of human experience in all its valences, from gutter to glitter, rut to rooftop. It’s about love in a sense, the “order and disorder of love” which the poet Paul Eluard describes: the “bath of glad tears” we experience in life, in the “first estate of man,” the well of thought and feeling deep “in the core of our body.” And it’s rooted in love as well, a love that fires and consecrates and imbues his art with conviction and grace. It draws inward only to distill and release. “I look for the equivalent of something inside me,” Antón writes, “because what’s inside me is equivalent to what’s inside everyone else.” His art is essentially a restorative act of sharing, of connecting with the world around and affirming a unity of thought. Proffered from the heart, we accept his work as a gift, and in turn are inspired to refocus on what’s valuable and moving in life, to reopen our eyes and ears to the things that exalt our world and restore it with spirit and wonder and euphony: the symmetry of snow crystals and complex theorems of stars; sweet cadences of talk and keening birdsong; a red-cheeked baby crying. These are the fluid strains that inform the remarkable world of Don Gregorio Antón, the gift he bequeaths to us in photography.
Paul LaRosa, one of the most articulate of contemporary photographic critics, is a Boston photographic bookdealer.
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