| The extraordinary begins the moment I stop1
In medieval thought, the crypt contained the seed of all possibilities. It was the magmatic heart where things were born and prepared to ascend into the nave of the church, where they would be called things. A space free of prejudice or morality, without even form, except for a certain foetal imprecision, intensified by darkness. Today, an ultrasound image might serve as a contemporary reference for this crypt. Espai 13 provides the framework. As for the subject, we have the individuals of Neus Buira – twelve faces emerging from the darkness in search of a way, through you, through me, or through him, to access the light. That is, to become something more than a face.
(Two worshippers descend. Let’s hide and listen…)
Worshipper 1 – Are you looking at me, or what are you thinking about? Who is this artist daring to challenge my supremacy as a viewer with such audacity? We came here to observe, and now we find ourselves being observed… Not with hostility, no, nor with malice. Rather, with little interest, but not complete indifference either.
Worshipper 2 – I feel like they’re piercing right through me!
W1 – You know what? This stirs up things I’d rather not have stirred. And it won’t let me leave, damn it! It reminds me of that time at the Prado, when The Boy from Vallecas – that hideous dwarf by Velázquez – stared at me with such a mocking expression that I had to run away! But here, everything is silent. How do you summon words when the sheer intensity of a gaze burrows into your gut like a hospital probe?
W2 – These portraits demand that I swallow them and then spit them back out. They insist that I lend them my soul, only to have it rejected once emptied – so they can claim their own autonomy. What are we playing at? And what if it doesn’t work every time? I feel surrounded by invisible tensions…
W1 – We’re playing at exchanging souls, don’t you see? If we place ourselves between two mirrors facing each other, which one wins?
W2 – We need to search for what lies beyond the mirror. Do you remember Valéry? “A work of art should always teach us that we have not seen what we are looking at… A modern artist must spend two-thirds of their time trying to see the visible, and above all, not attempt to see the invisible.”2
W1 – That’s true. Look! Don’t you see them speaking to each other now? What a commotion! And what if they were all me?
W2 – And you, who are you?
Mónica Regàs (The name should be aligned to the left, very close to the end of the text)
Footnotes:
1 “L’extraordinaire commence au moment où je m’arrête”, Maurice Blanchot in L’arrêt de mort, col. “Imaginaires”, n.º 15, Ed. Gallimard, Paris, 1948, p. 53.
2 Paul Valéry, Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, col. “Folio Essais”, Ed. Gallimard, Paris, 1957, p. 25–26. |
