If life is within art or art within life, then the limits between completeness and plausibility, between convincing and puerile, between neatness and redundancy, between emotion and asepsis, should be questioned.

In fact, Ariel feels at home painting. If the world collapsed, he would continue in his studio painting and doing everything he knows he is good at: seducing from the image. He would not change the themes due to demands of the medium or disturbed responses from others who demand from art what they do not understand or do not make an effort to understand. Probably that apparent minimalist fragility is nothing more than a pose that hides the animal that inhabits and possesses him. Everything indicates that this temptation of silence is reached by means of the approximation ritual that accepts the flirtation between the surface of the works and the variations of the beast condensed in the artist's body. The beginning, Ariel well knows, is important, but the decisive transition towards that true knowledge of the self only occurs if we erase the memory of that beginning and banish the origin. The painting of this artist moves away with all intention (confessed and manifest), from that idea of ​​origin, of primary culture.

If something I like about this artist's painting, it is his dispossession / emancipation of all tradition and that kind of tendency to fragment and to speculate. Ariel executes a painting that is fully fetishistic and manic. And it is because it shows a strange devotion (often pure irony) towards certain objects and articles of use that it deifies. One of those items comes to be himself. It is as if the work became an altar of the self, of the first person singular. His painting exalts and protects him, presents him on stage and at the same time withdraws him. He entrusts himself to it. Trust in the power of this, in the scope of representation as a space of legitimation and power. The painting takes on the role and functions of a pantheon, but this time not only for the worship of an ambiguous, modern and queer god; but also for the celebration of all the pleasures and lapses of this rich life. The sybarite that he is appears on the scene -with his best clothes- showing off his figure and style. Also, of course, those stuffed animals and sweets appear after an intention that could well be disturbing insofar as it is ironic, symbolic and playful.

Many of his representations, I think all of them, propose the existence of a new ontological space that does not establish distinctions between the human and the animal. That real and symbolic coexistence, that need for reconciliation between civilization and barbarism without being very clear about the beginnings and limits of one and the other, also supports literary speculation of psychoanalytic descent, encrypting the narrative and asserting the metaphor. Never ignore that Camp touch that, above the density and the adjudication of interested seriousness, turns Ariel's text into a game more aesthetic than political, more daring in its frivolity than boring from the anthropological point of view, more subversive in its beauty What a transgressor in the concept.

In front of the mirror I saw him sneak past when the man (and the artist) was transcended in his animal humanity.

-Art Critic-Andrés Isaac Santana

Madrid, Spain.