Spanish artist Antonio Segura, known around the world as Dulk, recently added a New York debut to his repertoire of global murals and exhibitions with Ephemeral Treasures, a solo show now on view at Spoke Art on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Hosted in cooperation with LA-based Thinkspace Projects, this latest endeavor features new paintings and sculptures that stretch the artist’s talent for magical realism and red herring whimsy to a wider range than he’s ever explored in one setting.
“The Earth, home of thousands of animals and plant species, has an incredible beauty that is difficult to define,” the press release from Spoke Art begins. “Mountains, valleys, plains, seas and rivers make up the masterpiece of chance and time, while the vegetation and animals that occupy the canvas give it that much-needed final touch, the spark that ignites everything.”
As the press release notes, “Phenomena such as global warming, deforestation or natural disasters often cause damage that affect directly the natural wonders of the planet.” Human society often disrupts the divine metronome marking time in nature’s evolution, thwarting the song’s organic ebbs and flows. While Dulk’s colorful work appears happy-go-lucky and optimistic at first, viewers who linger quickly determine its true purpose. Motifs like skulls, insidious glowing eyes and creeping wastelands give their warnings across the artist’s oeuvre. Without concentrated efforts to preserve the treasures this planet has gifted us with, they will fall by the wayside.
“The term ephemeral is a qualifying adjective that is used to designate those things or circumstances that last for a short time and that occur briefly,” the press release notes. “The concept of ephemeral comes from the Greek, ephemeros, which literally means ‘lasting a single day.’ Every day, the number of species that disappear from our planet is increasing and with them their stories of evolution, identities and treasures that we will never see again.”
Ephemeral Treasures has been nearly two years in the making. Dulk has fostered an ongoing relationship with Thinkspace and a long-held desire to take his work bicoastal. Over Zoom, the artist told me he finally began drafting the first sketches, designs, and concepts for this collection about a year ago, as the coronavirus pandemic began unfolding in Spain. Shortly after its onset, the artist underwent a dangerous surgery that left him stranded in a month-long recovery. “I felt almost dead, in some way,” he recalled. Still, Dulk managed to set about painting for Ephemeral Treasures a month later, in April 2020.
“I always feel very nervous in the beginning of creating a solo show,” Dulk intimated. “It’s a lot of responsibility and it’s a lot of time and work.” He overcomes this anxiety by approaching the process one step at a time. “I see the space, the gallery, and then I decide the different sizes that I need,” he explained. “After that, I create the different ecosystems.” The works throughout Ephemeral Treasures vary markedly in both setting and color scheme. Together, each disparate canvas composes a greater harmony. “It’s like the perfect match between all of them,” Dulk continued. “All the colors fit perfectly.”
A traipse about Ephemeral Treasures tours viewers through savannas and treetops and deep sea dives. This show accumulates sights from various trips the artist embarked upon over the past two years. “I’ve been in Africa, in Kenya, in the Everglades, in Florida, diving with the manatees. Each painting is my own experience with nature,” Dulk stated. “I wanted to create this union—my feeling, my experience in the place.”
He illustrates his memories through the lens of wildlife, often the very focus of his travels. At Lake Nakuru National park, he encountered flamingoes and saddle-billed storks and the Rothschild’s giraffes, “one of the most endangered distinct populations of giraffe,” according to the show’s press release. ‘Nakuru’ honors these animals. “I wanted to paint an artwork inspired in three generations of these endangered giraffes, hoping they will be recovered in time,” Dulk writes in the press release.
Meanwhile, ‘Crystal River’ plunges viewers underwater amongst the artist’s memories in Florida. “We were swimming in a middle of a river in a December cold morning and suddenly started appearing tens of curious manatees around us,” Dulk recounts from the trip in the press release. “They were swimming all around and playing with us, it was incredible.”
“India is one of the countries in my Wishlist to visit as soon as we could travel again,” he continues in writing. “We had planned a trip for last year but due to the pandemic I had to postpone. I always wanted to see tigers in freedom in their own habitat, but also the experience to visit an Asiatic jungle makes me so inspired too.” The show’s eponymous artwork offers a bit of collective dreaming, imagining the big cats in their natural habitat while also warning that “if we don’t take care of the nature their habitat will be ephemeral.”
The show’s sculptures tie back to Kenya—Dulk also visited the Olpejeta conservation where the last northern white rhinoceroses in the world reside. ‘Sudan,’ the last known male of this subspecies, was euthanized in March 2018 due to age-related complications. “Now there are only two females and then the species will be extinct,” Dulk told me. He visited Sudan’s tomb and recalled “It’s a place where your skin is like chicken,” referencing the Spanish term for goosebumps—piel de gallina. “I wanted to pay tribute for him with this sculpture.”
All these themes of life and death, natural contractions exacerbated and weaponized by human activity, find their culmination in ‘Bird Concert: Songs of Extinct Birds,’ Dulk’s largest canvas to date. “I always wanted to reinterpret my own version of the ‘Bird Concert’ paintings of Flemish painters of the 17th century,” he explains in the press release, referencing masters from the Spanish Netherlands like Paul de Vos, Jan Fyt, and Jan Van Kessel.
“Normally, the meaning of these kind of paintings is the freedom and union between all the different species,” Dulk told me. “In the middle, always, there is an owl singing, like the director of the orchestra. Around him, there are a lot of birds, different species from all over the world, from the five continents.” After five years spent imagining his own iteration, the artist took his own swing at last, marrying elements from his predecessors with aspects of timely import. Front and center, Dulk’s wise conductor sits atop a stack of books, studies on the songs of his since-passed cousins. The books’ spines list extinct species, their sad truths shrouded in fairytale beauty.
Curious to learn more in the artist’s own words, I asked Dulk directly about the bittersweet approach present throughout his practice. “Reality is like that,” he replied. The life/death/life cycle dictates all matter—Sumatran tigers hunt deer to sustain their offspring, wildfires allow the forest to flourish with new life, and someday this great big universe beyond our planet will lose steam and kick out for good, perhaps until the next big bang. Difficult truths abound in reality, and rather than facing with them, humanity devises counterintuitively destructive coping methods that eliminate intrinsic balance. Artificial expansion of the suburbs, an idyll indicative of our terrorizing pursuit for comfort, kills off natural predators and enables critters lower on the food chain to become pests. A trip to Disneyland keeps the existential dread at bay for but a day.
“When you go to a natural park, you see everything is beautiful, everything is nice,” Dulk continued. Not only does nature play host to its own brand of bittersweet reality, but it embodies our maladapted relationship to it. “It’s so sad that you have to go to a national reserve or to a protected natural park to see the animals. They are in refuges right now. Many years ago, they were in the wild. Now, they are in the wild, but it’s not the real wild, because they are protected in a super big cage, which is a natural park.”
His unique approach also helps to capture viewers’ interest, making his insights more accessible. Opening with misery often proves a turnoff—beauty offers a more alluring hook. “I try to put the authentic message behind the colors and behind the beautiful landscape,” Dulk stated. “I remember when I was a child, I really liked the illustrations with a lot of details and a lot of deeper meanings—when you can be lost just looking at all the details. I enjoy creating different little worlds inside of one painting. You can see different scenes with different characters, having their own relationships.”
This past, difficult year, the artist has sought wider pastures of his own, similar to those that animals ought to command. While crafting Ephemeral Treasures and recovering from his surgery, the artist also became a father and worked on two other large projects that will come to fruition soon. “I’m super tired, but at the same time, I’m super happy because despite of this COVID situation, I have a lot of work and I’m growing and enjoying the process as I never thought before,” he beamed.
Despite his strong beliefs, Dulk’s own intentions mirror the reality he’s working with, which perpetually nets neutral. When asked what he hopes viewers take from this show, he qualified that “For me, art has to transmit and has to create sensations.” Emotion alone serves the end goal. “I don’t know which kind of sensations, it doesn’t matter, but if you feel something when you see something, I think that is good,” he continued. “I think it’s the most important thing in a piece of art. I don’t want to say, ‘Okay, we have to save the planet.’ I only want that the people think about what’s happening and decide what they should do.”
Ephemeral Treasures is on view for individual evaluation through March 13th. Those who can should visit the show in Dulk’s stead, as the pandemic impeded his ability to attend his own Big Apple inauguration. The more time spent in front of these works, digitally or physically, the more there is to learn about what we already know, for we are animals ourselves, dancing to the same complex concert which precedes and outlasts us all.
