Why "Jaleos"?

Thank-you for taking a peek into my most recent work. I am thrilled to be able to share my new concept, Vaya Jaleo! with you.

This very Spanish colloquial expression, synthesizes my relationship with both painting and flamenco. Jaleo means “encouragement”, and also “ruckus” and “chaos”. Jaleos belong to one of the traditional palos or families of Flamenco, and it also refers to the way in which dancers, singers, musicians and audiences communicate with each other when engaging as a community with the music, the movement and the poetry to invoke the flamenco spirit or duende.

In the same way, when I engage with painting or graphic art I feel my ideas, my eyes, my hands, the medium, my time and my space interacting in the chaos of the moment. Each instant of the process reflects a decision encouraged by confusion, hope and memory. These rational and irrational decisions summon el duende and allow a choreography of instances to be traced into form. You can't catch el duende, but you can trace its reflection. As Spanish poet Federico García Lorca expressed in his poem The Legend of Time:

“Dream rides on Time

floating like a sailboat.

No one can crack open seeds

in the heart of Dream”

These past couple of years, I experimented with different palos of flamenco and art medium. From screen printing to intaglio, clay and oil painting; from jaleos to tangos, bulerías and guajiras, I found myself always deconstructing a musical pattern, creating a range of values for a specific volume, finding geometric figures, counting the silences or avoiding highlighting specific information in order to accentuate a certain aspect of the lyrics, the hue, the music, the temperature, the movement or the form. What a ruckus!

While doing this, I focused on the concept of Jaleo by deconstructing a very characteristic flamenco pose that painter John Singer Sargent captured masterfully in his work titled “Jaleo” (1882) and that you can visit at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, here in Boston.

I have been obsessed with the dancer’s pose on Sargent’s masterpiece for many years. I visited the painting often and saw it interact with the light, the darkness, the walls and the people that observed it. I have spoken to doctors, biologists, athletes and dancers about the possibility that this specific position held by the dancer may be simply unattainable by the human body: the angle of the elbow, the shoulder and the position of the legs that we can’t see. A doctor friend of mine visited my home studio, and after some time observing my studios of the dancer and trying to adopt the pose herself, concluded that it could be indeed possible to place the elbow at such an angle if the hips, back, shoulders, legs and feet where positioned in a specific way. Why would she strike that pose? To me, the pose is full of duende and Sargent felt it for sure.

While drawing, coloring and reshaping the geometry of this extraordinary glimpse into a flamenco instant, I remembered the teachings of some flamenco masters that I had the honor to take lessons from, such as Antonio Canales, Candela Soto, Amelia Vega, Sabrina Avilés and La Lupi. I also remembered the many conversations with my art teachers at MassArt, Nancy McCarthy and Christopher Chippendale and Randy Gerber at Mixit Print Studios who, like the flamenco masters, encouraged the ruckus and, while critiquing the students work, used the oral language to describe what they saw and did not see, what they felt and did not feel, what they hoped and imagined and wondered. Their encouragement, correction and invitation to ruckus and reflection while exploring a specific technique; their generous and deep sharing of what they discovered in flamenco, in art and in life throughout their life; the way in which they manipulate the metaphorical essence and limitations of the oral language to try to describe a mindset or a gut feeling that one can only master by finding it in oneself, by connecting to ones instinct… all this is what inspired me to work of this Jaleos.

Vaya Jaleo! is for all of you friends, family and teachers who have shared my journey and encouraged this ruckus. What a Ruckus! Vaya Jaleo, indeed!

Gracias!!!!!!!

Laura Bravo-Melguizo