I would have had the time if this exhibition were to have fallen – to earth – at the end of 2009: the time to set in order the events that have occurred in so many years of luminous career.
The Winter would have been the interlocutor of my poignant brooding, seeking out in hidden corners thoughts, utopias, clichés, the joys and sufferings with which the heavens have armed themselves to cast upon me.
Perhaps everything would have been misty, confused, a little rarefied, excessively bound up with the pelting of rain, of wind and ice that, all too often, penetrates the heart.
Winter, season of the transience of events that we cannot pin down; they slip through our fingers carried off by gusts of wind and driving rain, escaping into the darkness that swallows them up.
But then, finally, sweet Spring would have descended from the heavens: burgeoning of April and May that manages to reconcile the misdeeds of life, gilding them and setting them in the right light.
And then the Summer, so hot and still, ready to lighten our shadows, and then our past takes shape, light-filled form, a seal: a string of pearls restrung just as it should be.
But this is an exhibition that falls to earth in just a few days: the hours are already speeding by and there’s no time to lose. No time to delve into the hidden corners of the heart, into cupboards, into airless attics, into drawers we can no longer find the keys to…no time to dig up old friends that have disappeared, lost paintings; we have to thin out, thin out.
I’ve mustered what I could, what I had at arm’s reach: yellowed letters, forgotten daguerreotypes; books fell open regurgitating postcards of pleasant or exotic spots or of old Romanesque churches in ruins and pictures of friends dispersed who knows where.
The time is nearly up – the tolling of the hours is feverish; I have taken in my arms all my embrace could hold.
Ready for headlong consignment.