Tempest.

The painter Ulises Platas wields a brush that ignites the canvases of his works, grounding them with black, graffiti-like lines that resemble asphalted roads. Over these deliberately anarchic strokes, he highlights the reflections of his inner fire with phosphorescent brushstrokes, primarily in shades of orange. He then discreetly softens his creations with hints of pink, lightened sepia, and thick whites that serve as the backdrop to the intense black formations that give his pieces their depth. But the crucible of his style’s palette reaches its full temper when he sketches blue and white lines around the edges of the lava and coal smudges, drawing allegories—spirals, cages, tridents, umbrellas facing upward, others turned by the wind, crosses, and more. These signs refresh the surface of his canvases, sometimes giving them oxygen, sometimes symbols of hope amidst the fatalism of an era marked by the shrinking of time to think and enjoy the pure beauty of things. The classic beauty of oils and graphics has been relegated to the storerooms of museums. Today, it’s mostly about the abstract fantasy of the senses, and in that realm, Ulises Platas projects his works: tempests of color and mystery, fragments of his emotional storms.

Ulises is a painter with a serene face, but he can appear stern, at least serious and somewhat inscrutable. His penetrating gaze captures every detail of life, and he harbors an obsession with small sensations, which he later magnifies in his works—dedicating them to episodes of his passions and guilt. Ulises Platas lives his tempests and brings them to the easel, sometimes in large format. He is not shy; his revelations expose him like a child running through the streets during a storm, passing under gutters to receive, with closed eyes and open lips, the torrents of cold water. There’s a saying: “He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.” Ulises is a puff-cheeked Aeolus who blows and with the warmth of his breath, cultivates his fears and ecstasies. Like therapy for his spirit, he releases his instincts onto his canvases. Ulises’ tempest is the inner joy of his cornered soul. His soul is sensitive, captivated by beauty and goodness. The memories of his childhood, the mistakes of youth, and the forebodings of adulthood haunt him, and he can only soothe them with the worldly pleasures that compensate for his failings—or for not having been in the right place at the right time with the perfect remedy to ease the pain of his loves and the shadows of his heartbreaks.

Ulises' urgency is the constant in his paintings, expressing his race against time. The tempest chases him but respects him, for he himself was once a monsoon, sometimes a hurricane, other times a cyclone. The winds he sows are genuine hurricanes, and he carries them with him like a portable black cloud that electrifies his temples every time he touches his brush and aims it at a new canvas. The tempest is the guide of his life—tempestuous, yet full of vitality and passion. He prefers to wait for the right moment to surrender to his senses and indulge in art and color. That’s why Ulises honors the phrase, “After the storm comes the calm,” the creative calm that, in his case, is the pivot of his combustions. Ulises Platas lives in the eye of his hurricanes and has no desire to leave that place. He won’t listen to those who ask or demand it.