TEXTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About beauty

Biel Mesquida


biel-mesquida-02

He who writes is a militant against illiteracy. And a never-ending number of quasi-painters and shoddy daubers from this last decade are illiterate militants: they don’t know how to read or write. They are ignorant of the fact that they have no artistry, or mastery of their trade and continue polluting our eyes with damaging, non-biodegradable plastic garbage whenever they put their hand to anything.

After this frank, outspoken Catalan attack I will present an affirmation substantiated by a practising artist: Dolores Sampol (Mary-Sam to her good friends) is a painter who “thoroughly” knows her trade and her technique. In other words: DS (or MS) has a genetic aptitude for the production of images. The Sant Jordi College of Fine Arts (Barcelona) introduced her to the academic view and guided this facet of her DNA and on escaping from there (roaming around a Barcelona replete with rhizomatic seductions and learning) she discovered the layers of tradition and innovation; but, above all (notably), eleven years working day-to-day in art restoration gave her a profound knowledge of pigments and brushstrokes: the most diverse culinary art, laden with pictorial flavour.

Should the reader go to the source of the terminologies, to the first embryonic epiphany, he will find that at the end of the Xth century, when they said “restore” in Latin it literally meant, in every sense of the word, “to heal, to return to its original condition”, to do the necessary repairs to put the work into its previous state when it was new or untarnished”.

D.S. heals works of art. To handle a Gothic table, a Renaissance oil painting, a cubist painting or a Post-modernist canvas, requires a precise, exact wealth of knowledge.

To heal a damaged work of art it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of science and technology, in which physics and chemistry would play a great part. What I truly believe is that: a) painting is true craftsmanship; b) a good painter arises from the union between the mastery of the profession and the fruits of investigation.

biel-mesquida-03D.S. has achieved recognition in her profession and she now offers us the chosen bounty of her perilous explorations. D.S. knows, with the pragmatism of X-ray spectrography, with the analysis of a combination of pigments or with the precise effect of one product over another – to name three basic principles of restoration- which the Renaissance tradition, which moves science and art, materialised as numerous embryos at the end of the century. And the Renaissance shows and demonstrates that the arts were a form of knowledge which was not opposed to the sciences; on the contrary, it enriched and completed them; it furthered them. And now, more than ever, the arts have revealed themselves as essential vehicles of scientific communication and publication tools, because they help us to imagine the purely virtual thing, to give reasonable form to the concepts or to visualise an idea.

We didn’t have a “scientific revolution” in the XVIII century (Newton, Hume, Locke, Diderot, Mozart, Rousseau and Kant invented this notion), therefore we neither know nor practice criticism: catalytic hygiene, a key to culture, hostess of the physical, ethical space where they take root, grow, bloom and where the arts and the sciences flourish. There is another important point of evidence that should be mentioned: without criticism there is neither art, science, literature nor politics etc.: there is no culture: there is no beauty.

–But now what? Where does this constellation of fragments, provoked by the painting of DS, end up? It unfurls to release a set of questions, to draw a pair of simple ideas, to make a springboard for a non-existent debate …

The scientific theories carry as a certificate of value the capacity to resist the empirical cross-examination and rational analysis. There is an objectivity which everyone can see and believe. The technological advances also offer clear instructions to any user. But the more contemporary arts are lost and helpless with regard to critical evaluation. And in addition, the explosion of economic speculation amongst the art dealers and the market place create a stock exchange for the arts which rises and falls according to the whims of those who wield the power. The exploration into the nature of the arts has come to a resounding halt, that exploration which intuitively searches for the truth in order to explain so many current phenomena in today’s art and, at the same time, to reflect on profound connections between them and the new knowledge which allow us to reach the moon, the stars or listen to a concert by Haydn with the digital purity of the notes painted on sheet music. It needs to be voiced out loud because it seems no one wants to hear it.

Intimate short-circuits
biel-mesquida-04For this voyeur surrounded by the display of artistic vanities which, the older one becomes, radically auto-immunises us from the accepted and the often forgotten beauty of the great classical masters, it is said,  for this voyeur  the only criteria of pictorial value springs from a special neuronal signal– an ability of the soul, as the benign Kepler would say – which, without theoretical machinery or any conceptual tools, he perceives the ardent splendour of beauty sensitively and materially. It could be said that it is a genetic visual ability engraved on the helix of the DNA: a chromosomatic application, a process of comprehension, a familiarisation with a new understanding.

The current state of the pictorial investigations of DS (or MS) has dazzled me by its authentic beauty. Also the trains, lost in the middle of the Russian Steppes, materialising from hues upon hues, the bridges constructed over great white stains like fog or empty spaces, the weightlessness of a few lines in the air in anticipation of the antimatter, the simplicity of a public washing area where the perspectives of the water-lilies are like slashes of pigment on the canvas, the universe of wings and gasps of air which gather together around planes and sculptures, the fine engineering of knowledge within the tense vigour reflected by the colours, all this mini-catalogue of wonders, the innovative collection of plastic samples, the visual segregation of certain thoughts, has impelled me to write.

And when something provokes words it is because it radiates beauty.

 

Mallorca, 1990

 

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