“Instead of measuring the inside, the sense and the truth of the intellectual forms against an external factor, we need to search within these forms the dimension and the criterion of their inner truth and significance; instead of taking them as mere copy of something alien we need to see in each one of them a spontaneous rule of creation, an original and tendentious style of expression, which are in fact more than a mere image of something initially given through the stable categories of the real existence. Starting from this point of view myth, art, language and science are seen as symbols, not in the sense of pure images that hint to a reality by means of suggestions and allegoric interpretations, but as forces that create and establish, each one by itself, their own significant world. In this dominion the spirit appears in an intimately determined dialectic through which there is one reality only, an organized and defined Being. As a consequence the symbolic specific forms are not imitations; they are organs of the reality as it is through them that reality can turn into object of intellectual appropriation and in this manner become visible to our eyes”
Cassirer “Linguagem, Mito e religião” p. 13
“Art aims to create the finite that restores the infinite: it traces a plan of composition that presents monuments or composite sensations under the action of aesthetic images. Damish analysed Klee’s painting ‘Igual Infinito’ with rigueur. It is not an allegory but the pleasure of painting introducing itself as painting”
Deleuze e Guattari “O que é a filosofia?” p. 173
A time will come when the Supreme Good will announce itself and will condition our acts and a time will come when we will claim for Goodness and Goodness will seem to hide inert. A time will come when Justice, Truth and Beauty will conjugate in harmony according to Joyful Endings and time will come when the sad passions, the illusion and abjection will thrash life into death. There will be times of enjoyment and times of agony, of enlightenment and of darkness. Thus there will be times of serenity and of anxiety bringing along the richest variety of sensations ranging from the maximum potency to the maximum impotency.
There will be times when the image displays the contents of the word, and times when the word deludes while the image raves. Affections and Notions agree and disagree along the times, and change intermittently with the impulse of affections either in a vicious or in a virtuous circle. Every image meets the memory that talks back; every word meets its moulding hand. The notion that we receive and the notion that we give on departure cross the past and the future in a present that remains as long as the sensation continues into the times that lay ahead. Matter can embody that encounter of forces, those chants and those cries, those lights and shadows. Matter can feed the spirit and can be fed by the spirit.
It can be the image of fleshless angels and of soulless demons. It can be illuminating the announced Word and glorifying the divine Act. It can be deceiving censorship and it can be fighting tyranny. In the presence of the knot of Time, the images and the words are like angels and demons, bringing light or darkness to the certitudes of a finite knowledge, enlarging or cutting down the strength of a limited power. All poetry rises from this indeterminateness, every painting is composed by this undiscernibility.
The image may barely tell you what it brings to light from the depths of primordial times into the announcement of a universal Final Judgement. The words may scarcely stage the events plotting the endless epilogues that already compose an unavoidable end of History. The ultimate Finality has already been told by the notions and the images, and words are nothing more than means that adorn, that illustrate and exalt. The prime Cause has been determined and terminated long ago and the words and the images likewise are only seductive effects, explanatory and glorifying effects. Invisible, unspeakable models are copied unveiling fugacious sights of eternal essences. The agent (Artist?) in there is merely an emissary, a mediator, an actor in a plot that determines gesture and words. Like a secondary angel or a secondary demon momentarily placed at the heart of the scene.
The image may also, why? why not?, create its angels and demons ‘’invisible that turn visible’’ as if offered to the entire world without knowing where they come from and where to they will go. The words may invent ‘’joys and pains that are truly felt’’ as if offered by the entire history without a clear sight of their memories and projections. New senses, new lifeless values are created side by side with old truths and ethics.
Selections are made in name of this life, of what is good, of what brings joy even amid sad moments, even not looking good, even facing death. There is feeling and there is will for the unknown, for the never even thought. Everything possible and what makes it possible is made to appear in the real conditions that are given for conditioned action. It’s almost the sacrilege of the fallen angel, the emancipation of a reconverted demon.
The artist may then create, trace, invent, open the horizon, bring the whole existence to focus with the power that wasn’t there before, to feel, to figurate, to compose. Hers are the angels as if belonging to everybody, the demons are intimate as if those of her own species, and what she sees and what she does is her life materialized, spiritualized, for all times to come. The gesture captivates the presence of what she is missing, the glance outlines the impulse that raises her to the skies and gives her back her dead ones as alive, always alive and free to share in her language all the times that forever will come.
The image gives back her angels, untouched, in the presence of all the words of all Myths and Histories.
Catarina can thus ultimately do her painting publicly.
“Seize and share in communion: these are our memories in bleeding flesh; these are our tears, healing us inside by a gesture of wing. I bring you here, gentlemen, the fruit of that universal and necessary toil that brings us together in the incarnation of the eternal alliance with the ephemerality of life. These are my images of our chansons de geste. Transmuted they will forever dwell in me and amidst you, total, along each clean and free day, with every anxiety and storm”.
With this series of works named “Wings to my angels” it is my purpose to highlight the symbology of the wings, the plenitude of flying. They are dedicated to my angels who have already departed … in their voyage to Infinity.
Rui Mascarenhas, Miramar 2012
BACK <<
