1. First came the word
Blai Bonet aspired to illuminate his readers with his writing. His poetry opens our eyes to the enigmas of life. His brilliant and colourful words land precisely in the heart of man, mimicking silence through the music of the gods that inhabit the world of words and the universe of emotions. Blai Bonet strived to transform shadows into epiphany. He longed to open the doors and windows of mystery to allow a pure and revitalising, intense and renovating current to pass over the essence of everything, over the very transcendence of reality. To transform life from a humid and opaque enclosure to a space filled with a constant, warm and comforting light. If Goethe claimed that colours are the passion of light, this poet imbued himself with the perfume of creation in order to offer meaning to existence. Perhaps chasing dreams and utopia (with your feet on the ground!) is what enriches life. Blai was, and is, as classic as Virgil, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Pindar, Hesiod or Heraclitus… Rather than looking to the past with keen and contemplative eyes, he drank from the fountains of principle, initiating a personal doctrine based on his blind faith in man and a devotion toward nature and living beings, toward elements and facts. He did this with the metaphysical contemplation of a sage and through a vigorous and exultant language. He combined the bright spark of genius with the sarcastic humour of the sceptic.
The earth and the sea, myth and legend, tree and stone, doubt and belief, root and bark, reason and excess… Nothing escapes the careful and attentive gaze of the man who speaks to himself in order to answer questions and clarify uncertainty. Blai knew that true art smoulders in the depths of the human spirit like a secret flame, like an ancient relic, like an indecipherable hieroglyph. What drives a man to go in search of – his – truth? Tradition, perhaps? Religious sentiment? An existential void? Disease? Blai Bonet started to write El Mar in the Caubet Sanatorium. Up there, between the earth and the sky, in the precise spot where the human and the divine meet, halfway between the mundane and that which aspires to be sublime, the poet’s spirit gave voice to a world that until then had remained faithfully silent and concealed. Up there, death and life began a fierce, incessant, devouring battle… Youth was attacked day in and day out, whipped with pain and suffering. Fear ate away at the lungs of those youths that stood face to face with their fears and delusions. Manuel Tur and Andreu Ramallo stood before the mirror that reflects the latent fragility of life, which must resist so as to win the war against annihilation and destruction. Tur and Ramallo met again, as post-war youths, at the sanatorium in Argelus. There, beset by tuberculosis, terrified by the cavernous rumour of their blood, they had to (re)build a world made in a fearful image. The horror of war and the injustice of hunger and death, of humiliation and lies, settle in the very essence of their cold and skeletal bones, their eyes filled with dread, their hearts pierced through by spears of desperation, and that numb longing that accompanies a tragic sense of guilt.
So this is why Ramallo, Blai Bonet, speaks from his soul. He keeps himself company in his solitude, questioning what he considers opaque and vague. And yet the guilty feeling reappears, the need for atonement, a scion of time that stops in order to invoke the repressive duality of good and evil, reason and madness, joy and torment… The legacy that Blai Bonet leaves us with is the lyricism of a new language that is harsh and violent, throbbing and energetic, suggestive and rich. As heirs, Eva Choung-Fux and Marcos Vidal have now added another link to the chain of this enduring artwork.
2. The Gaze of Sisyphus
Eva Choung-Fux knows where the guardian angel is buried. She knows the abysmal depths of the circles where Dante saw himself reflected a thousand times over, approaching them, plunging in, observing from a distance. A terrain that is seductive and dangerous, where divinities dwell. Luckily, she decided to wade into the turbulent waters that baptised one of the giants of literature. Eva's attraction to words is almost religious. She is loyal to a faith that began in antiquity and that echoes in our time, much like a sacrifice or a tribute liberated by the gods of beauty and reflection, of creation and thought, of exploration and truth… Looking back, we find a catalogue of Eva Choung-Fux´s passion, her primordial need to work with words, in her tributes to other important authors such as Ramon Llull, Saint John of the Cross, Wislawa Szymborska, Damià Huguet… Now it is the poet’s turn. She rekindles his latent memory, a flame at times small and weak, alongside the installations by Marcos Vidal for our unique, multifaceted and universal Blai Bonet. Although dignified and ambitious, the task remains enormously challenging. Reaching a safe harbour requires the attributes and talents of a creative and tenacious person. A person who is sensitive, educated, ingenious and persistent…
What provokes a restless and beautiful spirit to commune with a lucid mind and a wild heart? What determines the spiritual connection and the emotional harmony between two distant and dissimilar beings? In this particular case, the answer can only be one: a passion for art. Creative culture taken to the highest level of devotion. A dedication of body and soul, marked by effort and constancy, and a desire for improvement that embraces honesty and rigor. Shaping the stimulus that life lays before us as though she were an attentive muse that longs to travel beyond the threshold, across boundaries, with a feverish desire and determination to capture the real and essential feeling of existence. This is what Eva’s work offers us, her irrepressible eagerness to go further, to not get stuck on the surface. To reach the very seed, the fruit, the core of what is truly necessary and important. This is why Eva writes, copies, paints the words of Blai Bonet’s El Mar on her canvas. Our sea, our Mediterranean Sea, filled with light and shadow, our land of sun and cliffs, salt and waves… Eva goes beyond the voice of those exiled angels on her virgin canvas. With her brush, miraculously, she gives her colours form and presence, narrating the lives of two non-existent youths, two fictional characters that are just as real and true as life itself. Eva writes, and engraves, on a new, raw and tender skin, the scars of chance and the injuries of adversity. She focuses this calligraphic tension, one that perhaps Blai Bonet experienced himself, on a cloth that could be, or should be, the shroud that eats at Manuel Tur’s sad and sinful flesh.
And what can we glean from these fragments of El Mar? Wounds, on paper, which have yet to scar? Water that stirs the still depths of the sea? The imprint of a nameless and unforgiveable sacrifice? Eva Choung-Fux, heir to hieroglyphs and palimpsests, owes a debt to those medieval monks that copied unique and original books over and over again. Perhaps she’s even spiritually connected to Sisyphus, condemned to push the rock to the top of the mountain for all eternity. She stamps verbs on pronouns, adverbs on adjectives, buries names under the fire and ashes of a prose that must live on and stay close to those endless days, from here to eternity, from generation to generation, because we will never stop believing in the transcendental importance of art, regardless of how it is expressed.
Eva perfectly embodies the artist who is nourished by tradition, in this case, a literary tradition. She takes one step further in order to accept this challenge, this challenge locked in a fraternal embrace with commitment. She pays homage to those that came before us in the noble and difficult task of keeping the spark of artistic expression alive. The images she presents in this in memoriam homage to the poet of Santanyí capture the attention of the viewer with a mixture of warmth and indifference. We find ourselves halfway between a pleasant tenderness and a muffled heartbeat, as though we were caught between two opposing forces, contemplating two sides of an unrecognizable body. And we see, particularly in the seven pieces inspired by Manuel Tur, contact and rejection, proximity and distance, communication and isolation…
The Memòries submergides (Drowning Memories), which are saturated with the colours of the sea and the sky, are like blocks of ice that have sunk into the depths of the sea. They are icebergs colliding with each other and dancing to the rhythm of remote and expansive currents. These pieces make us feel cold and nostalgic; they refer to the very beginning, to genesis itself. They allude to a fear of forgetfulness, the inability to keep a memory alive so as not to get struck by the same stone twice, suffer the same fate twice, and be able to keep bad luck at bay. It is clear however, that we always have hope! We have the necessary strength to resist a little longer. This is the great wonder of artistic genius: the ability to transcend reality and go beyond the limits of truth and beauty. This is what Eva Choung-Fux achieves through the ritual of crafting shapes and mixing pigments.
In Tríptico Esperanza (Hope Triptych) and Tríptico Creencia (Belief Triptych) she continues to copy the texts of Blai Bonet. El poder i la verdor (power and nature) are the words that appear, letter over letter, syllable over syllable, word over word. It is a reflective path of sorts, intimate and personal, which is mirrored in the contemplation of a new birth, exposed to a new dazzling light. Through this intense and evocative exercise, this repetitive and revealing gesture of invoking the “daemon”, one enters an intense state of ecstasy. It is the same “daemon” with which Socrates maintained long debates and fruitful conversation by way of that inner voice that emerges through thought. An emotional tension and a constant spiritual force must clearly be present when handling the paintbrush, when shaping this psalm, prayer or supplication on canvas. Rather than simply creating the impact of a vibrant or potent image, what is transmitted here is the energetic and reflective impulse that germinates deep within the heart, where space and time strike a deal with the power of man and nature to celebrate the preciousness of revelation and creation.
Once again, Eva transforms the words, verses and poems into linked structures. Lineal sequences that go beyond a concrete or specific meaning to establish a dialogue with the memory of the poet. With her writing/painting she tells us: “I’m here and I’m thinking of you”. Which is like saying: “I yearn for you”. It is for this very reason, beyond the limits of passing time, erasing temporal and geographical boundaries, taking advantage of the ochre and green colours in Blai Bonet’s imagery, that she takes us to the most delicate, fragile and gratifying place in aesthetic experience. We become aware of a sense of calm and comfort. An air of serenity and tranquillity overcomes us. It is almost as though this exercise of repeated copying has a healing effect on the chaos of emotions and the exaltation of passions. The divine punishment of climbing the mountain with the rock on her back becomes a joyous and comforting task.
Words, packed together, without any physical contact between them, scattered “islands in the sea”, become a common line, an enclosed and compact mosaic, a colourful rush mat, imbued with some intangible and enigmatic corporeality which kidnaps our gaze and hypnotises us instantly. This primeval force is persistent, telluric… Because, in the end, we sense that the canvas, its surface, holds something deeper. It invites us to participate in the creative experience. This thing that is both luminous and cryptic, urges us to celebrate the mystery of life while we invoke the superimposed words, the accumulation of colours, the space surrendered to “horror vacui”. The interpretative non-vision of the observer, who is immediately reminded of action painting and the text paintings of Henri Michaux, breaks when the crosses rise to the surface of In Memoriam B.B, disturbing and unsettling images, filled with meaningful intensity and visual strength.
At this point, the handwriting appears more disperse, voluminous. It leaves a deeper mark, embodying disappearance. The black and wounded cross, amid burnt and ashen words, rises and takes the leading role, becoming the dark shadow of a landscape sewn with seeds of ink and hidden roots that originated this extensive and tumultuous plane of nouns and verbs. They have lost all meaning now, buried under the weight of their own invisible presence, disembodied, linked only to the erratic pilgrimage of a soul forced to wander for eternity, faceless and limbless, guided solely by the thread of an infinitely fragile and evanescent memory. A memory, however, that stirs remembrance and longing. A memory that carries with it the rumour of an ancient melody, an initiating, Adamic song complicit in knowledge and friendship. Incorporating the music of composer Joan Valent, it celebrates the joy of the gratifying complicity that emerges when two souls who share a similar vision of the world and the earth, the cosmos and the universe, find each other, there, in the mundane world of men, floating in an atmosphere of artistic restlessness and creative longing.
The lord moves in mysterious ways. Man does not. And neither does woman. Fortunately, we can enjoy discovery, exploration. We can soak up the new and the unknown. We can wander and drift until we discover something that had gone unnoticed. This lies at the core of the message that Eva Choung-Fux gives us in El segundo camino (The Second Path). She is not referring to the afterlife but rather to living on in the memory of others through the objects that we leave behind and the anecdotes that are passed on, altered but present. It is literally an offering that pays homage to the memory of our loved ones. These sculptures made from jetsam and flotsam, refuse, evoke the passage of time and decay, but also the possibility of renewal, the survival instinct within us all. Rather than vanishing, they are deformed, change shape, lose luminosity and colour day by day, altered by time and fantasy. Stones, bones, plastic of varying shape and size stage this return to the beginning, the first meeting, the first kiss and the final handshake. The first sign of complicity and the farewell embrace.
Eva Choung-Fux, with her exquisite sensitivity and her suggestive and effective art, has brought back the luminous gaze and the rich, lyrical, poetic world of Blai Bonet. Eva has appropriated the phrase “strength in unity”. She strives to leave indelible marks for our eyes, but goes further still, with even stronger vigour and generosity, to leave them at the very core of our heart. A heart made in the likeness of time and memory, remembrance and longing.
3. The Cry of Prometheus
Did Prometheus cry out when he stole the fire from the gods? And if he did, was it out of joy for accomplishing such a difficult feat? Or was it a cry of suffering, the result of experiencing the burning heat of the flames first hand? Was it a combination of joy and physical pain? Indeed, it is only through sheer and undying effort that all great endeavours become a reality, after fiercely battling internal and external forces. Fortunately, there is always a reward at the end, regardless of whether the struggle is personal or collective. Even if life is nothing more than that: working hard in order to sleep well at night.
Did Andreu Ramallo and Manuel Tur sin so as to experience the comfort of atonement? Or was it their disease that offered a kind of divine redemption? Why is the human spirit so closely linked to the tragic side of existence? Why do rebellious and unfortunate characters seem closer and truer to us? In El Mar, we find two sad and cruel young men, heirs to Dionysus, who are fearful and tormented. We also see the other side of this mirror. The flipside. Of course, there are the wounds of the Civil War, the chastisement of a suffocating religion, evil repression. But, above all, there is a feeling of guilt. An eternal and inevitable prison sentence that serves as an example, most likely because the time and place resembled hell. A living hell. Marcos Vidal perceives these events from a not-so-distant past of unfeeling evil and brutality. His installations take us back to those nonsensical and cruel times.
Marcos Vidal’s name immediately makes us think of the Sant Marc workshop: a “locus amoenus” for creation and creativity. The studio set up in the cellar of the house belonging to the artist’s grandparents became a meeting place for artists and those drawn to art. Located in the historical centre of Sineu, it has served as a receiver and transmitter of culture since 1999, a space where singular and suggestive visions of art can come together. Marcos Vidal, with his highly unique character marked by a rich inner world and boundless imagination, approaches El Mar with what could be called a historical perspective. His objects refer to the Civil War and the post-war years, coordinates in a space and time that we would be wise to remember so as to make sure we never have to live through them again.
The exchange of projects and ideas, the study of new techniques and materials, the collaboration between artists of different generations and styles, has always signalled the progress of the creative and artistic process. Marcos Vidal has been always been interested in the communicative interplay between transmitter and receiver. His spirit falls somewhere between the will of the medium and the goals of the guru. Rather than chasing a doctrinal formulation or the obstinate worship of some kind of gospel, his aim, beyond any aesthetic impact, is to awaken within the spectator the need to ask questions and, if possible, reach conclusions by eliciting answers. A demonstration of talent is not enough. It takes more than mere artistic genius to stand before the mirror, right where the viewer watches with curiosity, the viewer who went to the trouble of interpreting the symbols and signs found along the way.
In the first piece, Aquí estamos (Here We Are) the exultant Franco-era newspapers and the ashtray in the shape of Spain that rests carefully on the glass table tell us exactly where we are. It doesn’t take long to guess the time and place. The wooden chair with no front legs – they are painted crudely and haphazardly on the wall – with the holy cards under the weight of the hind legs, might indicate the lameness of some antiquated religious group and the excessive power they exerted over villagers and peasants. The surgical bed clearly exudes a cold and fearful air. It is almost as though the fragility of existence emerges from the aged and rusty steel, the transitory nature of our existence. It inspires a certain defencelessness that overwhelms us at times with the sudden force of a slamming door or the swift swing of an axe when faced with the birth of a child or the devastating force of nature.
In Lavativa (Laxative), newspapers piled on low stools under the objects give the appearance of an excessively perfect, strict order. One gets the feeling of having to follow certain pre-established patterns through the grace and work of an invisible God who is real, who exists in everyone’s belief structure. And the weight of history clearly replaces the human body. Laxatives restore order to bodily dysfunctions. That said, does Marcos Vidal use this as a (pre)text, as a way of telling us that it would be better to purge, expel, and unearth the deadly sins and social injustice? And what of the two chairs painted white? What a strange couple! Are they twin chairs that mutated and must live out the rest of their days conjoined? They are two worlds that meet. Two (uni)verses that gravitate around a mutilated central axis. Which part invades which? Which one is condemned and which one plays the executioner? Manuel Tur or Andreu Ramallo? They both do, in their own way. Vitrina de la victoria (Vitrine of Victory) is presented precisely as a celebration, a triumph, a conquest, using footballs as trophies, their skin dried out and eaten away by kicks and the changing seasons.
Yes, time puts everything into its place and makes value judgments. We sense the passing of time when we find wrinkles on our skin and we can no longer run with the same agility or speed as when we were young and carefree dreamers. As a whole, this vision-installation recreates the time of these fallen angels with their infected wings and lifeless hearts. Marcos Vidal shows us and exposes one side, as physical as it is lyrical and abstract, of a past, which still, for better or worse, lies smouldering in the ashes of memory. We could talk about a representation of reality that takes from visual poetry and conceptual expression: a way of speaking without words, particularly through objects and their sublimation.
The task of transforming found objects into artistic elements ought to be linked to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. In reality, Marcos Vidal’s “objectual” work emphasises the idea or message more than it does aesthetic visualisation. He has a need to communicate. He attempts to establish a dialogue, a kind of conversational feedback with the other. The humour and irony of his previous work are absent here. Immersed in the enclosed and distressing atmosphere of the novel, conscious of the evils of that despotic and repressive time, Marcos Vidal opts for a position that settles somewhere between complaint and condemnation, between dissatisfaction and stupefaction, between unease and rage…and these installations are more than just icons, relics and totems that long to possess the gift of beauty and devotion. They work as pagan altars; spaces for reflection and tranquillity that pay homage to an era and to events that were experienced in the flesh by the protagonists of Blai Bonet’s book. Possibly, the secret of these pieces lies in the metaphoric strength they exude. Watching them carefully, even for just a few seconds, sets a slideshow in motion, depicting those tragic and ignominious episodes, black and white images projected inside of us, in that space where we store the imagery of the past. Obviously, this effect was multiplied when Agustí Villaronga adapted the book for the screen.
Here, the idea is to move beyond the everyday nature of a country doctor’s instruments and archival material to reach the category of conceptual art. As with any anecdote, it might seem unimportant at first, but after several decades it transforms into a kind of legend or myth that is handed down from generation to generation. In the end, it is this oral legacy that will be spared by the voracious appetite of oblivion. Prometheus salvages this cry from obscurity. Is it worth risking an artistic adventure to let loose with the deafening cry of authentic discovery? Yes, without a doubt. For this very reason recycling, iconography, collage, symbolism, allegory...all play a part in Marcos Vidal’s effort at creating a body of work – a personal voice, a registered trademark, a unique copyright – that overflows with originality and purity.
Giacometti said that truth was infinitely more interesting to him than art. Perhaps this maxim could be applied to the installations with which Marcos Vidal pays homage to one of the greatest literary voices that these lands have given us. The poetry of Blai Bonet reminds us of the bright luminosity found in Homer’s verses. Marcos Vidal transmits a full range of emotions and feelings. After a gestation period that might last milliseconds, minutes, or who knows, perhaps even hours or days, they emerge like a ray of light, a precise revelation that strikes us with stunning clarity, the shortest path to get at the very essence, the seed that always germinates from his compositions. And thus, we are ready for the last leg of the journey, confident that the route is correct, that we’ve chosen the right path to clear up doubts and answer questions. When all is said and done, truth cannot exist beyond the certainty and the confidence you find in yourself.
4.The last word
First came the word. Followed by the movement of water and the serenity of colour. Cold and fire. Laughter and tears. Desire and hate. Health and disease. Dreams and fears. Friendship and betrayal. Sins and guilt. The drought and the flood. Spirits and resurrection. Dance and repose. The cycle of seasons and fertility rites. Everything, absolutely everything, would sooner or later become art.
One day, humanity’s development seemed unstoppable and Nietzsche screamed to the heavens that the only possible god was man. And from here to eternity. From here to the transformation of the ineffable into the divine. The search for an absolute and for consecration. The pursuit of a piece of work, be it social, artistic or scientific…that justifies, on our uncertain and perishable path through this strange and dangerous world, the destiny of those chosen by light. Who then, is chosen? Quite simply: the creators. The artists. The ones that leave their mark forever, long after their body and soul have passed into the cold and eternal oblivion of the void.
Eva Choung-Fux and Marcos Vidal are clear examples of people touched by the gods of inspiration. The muses accompany them day and night. Night and day, they observe the signals coming from a distance, from a remote and unknown place, seeking to reunite with talent and genius, to scatter a perfume of wisdom and a sacred scent. They are the guardians of the treasure. They are the heirs to the philosopher’s stone. They are the seed and the fruit. They are the last word.
They have done this for us. As Blai Bonet already said: “To remember, re-mem-ber, means to bring things close to the heart”. Let us remember together. All of us. From here to eternity. In Memoriam.
