On black.
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Guest contributor: Pedro Oriol.
Painter
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Why reproach a sorrowful person for their sorrow, and a joyful one for their joy?
Each time a flash of light illuminates one part, the other is cast into shadow, and in that movement we are all contained, the darkened and the radiant alike.
A requiem transcends our grief just as a hymn unites us in joy.
An art without shadows will always be a flat art. What simplicity it is to relate joy to colorism and sadness to blackness! How beautiful Renoir’s intentions were, but how mannered his last painting, weak and cottony.
To shut oneself between four walls before a blank canvas is not a gentle path. Nor is it a vain, decorative game.
To paint a flower is to halt the brief instant of its splendor, a hymn to life on the very edge of disappearance.
We ought to leave behind all imposture, all theatricality. That of the one who laughs pretending and that of the one who weeps imploringly.
Art can penetrate into the deepest black of the earth or rise weightlessly toward the radiant, blinding fullness of white. But it will always carry within itself the shadow of an invisible death that has nothing to do with the cadaverous. A germinating, creating death of successive realities.
The first stroke is already an advance when I paint on a dark ground. The brushstrokes seem to emerge, like the origin of the universe, from a black hole. Even the densest shadow has there its degree of light. And the passage toward brightness is a journey toward hope.
