anybody home?

the street and the houses.
the outside and the inside.
the visible cold and the imagined heat.
the rules they invent for us to follow; the secrets that they allow us to keep.
the absence of time and the promise of an end – maybe in the next corner.
the seen and the hidden.
the old and the modern.
the gray and the red.
the shinning of the day and the presage of its decline, the subtle shadow in the very core of light.

is there any people inside the houses? some name plates seem to suggest so; but their owners may be elsewhere for the moment.
the snow that accumulates outside; and the persistent question: inside, which kind of dust is about to fill every empty room?
what are the plants falling down on the façades really for? are they the only living being around? are they just sleeping until the first figure appears, taking some life, some animation, into the frame?
so many questions, so many windows, an apparently easy way to go through - and the mystery persists.

every image is just an approach to its underpinning geometry, its architecture.
and when we can discard the accumulation of things and see just the geometry, the architecture, actually we are confronted with the face of absence, of the author, of the geometer.
there is nobody home.
no need to knock at any door.

the Geometer has left us alone with the images that we constantly produce and reproduce, in an endless quest of Him, in an absurd sticking to the image of a lonely and distant quarter.

voj 2007
Photo (Old Riga): Evita Alle

Quoting Mark Rothko

"Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative."

"I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."

"It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."

"The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point."

Source: http://www.artquotes.net/masters/
rothko-mark/rothko-quotes.htm

Quoting René Magritte

"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing...they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."

Source: http://www.artquotes.net/masters/
rene-magritte/magritte-quotes.htm

Quoting Francis Bacon

"The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure; it’s a little like making love, the physical act of love."

"Picasso was the first person to produce figurative paintings which overturned the rules of appearance; he suggested appearance without using the usual codes, without respecting the representational truth of form, but using a breath of irrationality instead, to make representation stronger and more direct; so that form could pass directly from the eye to the stomach without going through the brain."

"I need the city; I need to know there are people around me strolling, arguing, fucking—living, and yet I go out very rarely; I stay here in my cage."

Source: http://www.artquotes.net/masters/bacon_quotes.htm
Source of image (Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X -1953
by Francis Bacon): http://www.artquotes.net/masters/bacon/paint_study.htm

letónia

o inverno, fazendo transbordar as margens dos rios, invade e dilui todos os recantos das paisagens tranquilas herdadas do verão. talvez a natureza necessite destas convulsões periódicas para se sentir viva.
mas a principal questão está nas cores, no domínio absoluto do azul e do negro. não espanta que os troncos, que resistem ao arrastar das torrentes, se retesem na sua escuridão. no fundo cabe-lhes guardar os gérmenes do futuro, a vitória do mundo vegetal sobre o mundo primitivo, caótico e inabitável, das águas, que o inverno cada ano volta a soltar.
os troncos seguram o eixo da realidade entre dois universos fluídos e azuis: o correr apressado das nuvens, a precipitação dos rios. cabe-lhes o papel de transmissão do passado para o futuro, da morte para a vida, quando de novo as ervas e as folhas despontarem, e as cores saltarem e voarem como bichos na proliferação da atmosfera: o verde, o amarelo, o vermelho, os tons onde o sangue quente se afasta da imobilidade rochosa, lisa, espelhada, do inverno.
o inverno é uma espécie de geologia que nos antecede, nos invade irresistivelmente, e nos petrifica. ficamos como árvores, muito quietos, à espera dos primeiros sons de pássaros que hão-de vir, mesmo de noite, anunciando a volta da humanidade aos campos, e às suas tarefas ancestrais.

voj 2007

para a Evita e para o Gonçalo

Foto: Evita Alle