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Lot Essay
In Cementerio de elefantes - Bosque de elefantas, the forms of the assembled elephants appear almost organic in their composition. They verge on abstraction, with the sweeping rise and fall of the trunks and the bodies hinting at the original skeleton of automatic painting that almost certainly brought the forms into existence. This is like some mysterious grey landscape, itself related in part to the rises and falls of the volcanic topography of Domínguez' native Tenerife. The trunks appear to curve and twist and snake around; some are thorny, some appear to have been butchered at the end, or have perhaps transformed into strange fleshy flowers. Some of the hulking forms of the bodies appear more like the rear, not the front, of an elephant, and one or two on the right even hint at the rear of a crawling woman.
In this way, Domínguez has created a strange and disquieting organic vision of the mythical elephants' graveyard that taps into the dark confines of his own mind and subconscious. In the foreground, a broken tusk could have been taken for its worth in ivory, yet clearly hints at past violence, at defeat and at emasculation. The greatest of Domínguez' paintings tap into a disturbing cocktail of desire and violence, and Cementerio de elefantes - Bosque de elefantas is headily redolent with both. The still yet imposing, cliff-like forms of the elephants have a curviness and fleshliness that hints at sensuality, yet this is expressly disrupted by the thorns both in the trunks and in the background. These thorns hint at the artist's complex relationship with his own desires, with his preoccupation with violence, a preoccupation that was all the more anxiously pertinent against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War which was raging when this picture was executed.
In this way, Domínguez has created a strange and disquieting organic vision of the mythical elephants' graveyard that taps into the dark confines of his own mind and subconscious. In the foreground, a broken tusk could have been taken for its worth in ivory, yet clearly hints at past violence, at defeat and at emasculation. The greatest of Domínguez' paintings tap into a disturbing cocktail of desire and violence, and Cementerio de elefantes - Bosque de elefantas is headily redolent with both. The still yet imposing, cliff-like forms of the elephants have a curviness and fleshliness that hints at sensuality, yet this is expressly disrupted by the thorns both in the trunks and in the background. These thorns hint at the artist's complex relationship with his own desires, with his preoccupation with violence, a preoccupation that was all the more anxiously pertinent against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War which was raging when this picture was executed.