INDOC. Documentation centre about Art and Nature

Mariano Anós presents his personal vision of the Beulas-Sarrate Collection

Exhibitions for A Glimpse Within are held at Exhibition Hall 2 of the CDAN. The previous participants were artists Fernando Sinaga and Enrique Larroy, musician Juanjo Javierre, and writer Manuel Vilas. This time it is Mariano Anós (Zaragoza, 1945) who has made a selection of works from the collection. Anós is especially engaged in the performing arts scene but has also pursued a range of other cultural activities. The works he has chosen are by artists Ignasi Aballí, Francisco Arias, Vicente Badenes, José Manuel Broto, Alberto Carrera Blecua, Joan Hernández Pijuán, Antón Lamazares, Fernando Lerín, Joaquim Mir, César Montaña, Antoni Tàpies and Romà Vallés.

Based on the selection of works, Anós presents a reflection on the theme of landscape, as he explains in the following text written to accompany the exhibition:

Es trabajo de siglos el paisaje
Cuya luz va a morder casual retina,
Carroña vengadora que examina
Al mortal que le rinde vasallaje.

Leerás la penuria de su encaje
Como cuerpo es tu cuerpo de doctrina,
Que hasta el azul más cauto al fin termina
En sustancia amarilla de lenguaje.

Un eco de tu ausencia es la figura
Que en el temblor fugaz del panorama
Dibuja una precisa arquitectura.

El secreto del mundo es su proclama.
No hay ver si no es el verse la espesura.
No hay nombrar sin nombrarse como trama.

Figure of the Horizon

A sonnet is a vertical landscape. The cloudscape of its quatrains seems to flow quite smoothly. The second tercet (foreground, dense, earthly) may give the impression of having been imposed by a god as evidence of his existence. The first tercet is elusive; it is the one that resists, like a wound not easily sutured. This is where the work lies. The transition from four lines to three: a virtually impossible task. One must come down to earth; the question is how to draw attention to a shift that gets lost between the eye and the brain. An exhausting effort. Why? Because one is up against the figure of the horizon: panic.

Every landscape is inhabited by figures. In reality it is a mad endeavour to erase the besieging figures, to reduce the terror, perhaps to find in it another distance that will never be one of repose. For a landscape painter repose is forbidden. To paint a landscape is to confront the horizon of defeat. The adventure will lie in getting to that point, recognising it, and having the courage to withdraw while whispering in its ear: ‘enough, I can go no further, I am prepared to bear the interval until the next defeat.’ Failing time and again to reach the end: a landscape is a plural effort, the tattered outcome of a stubborn succession of failures. Beckett: ‘Fail again. Fail better.’

The digestive system of the real that always slips away, it does nothing but flee (and its flight is the only thing that really belongs to us), the figure of the horizon multiplies its disguises to the point of vertigo, for vertigo is its mission. And what are we to do but fall for its disguises, always starting over again, like the sea, like Claude, like Turner, like Rothko, like anyone who, free of gods, dares to set forth in the tremor of the sacred.

For the landscape shakes: it is what shakes. What does the format matter? What does it matter if we see a deer, a mountain, a bridge, a furrow or a poplar grove? There is still the tremor, opening up to the abyss. Because ‘there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in’ (as Leonard Cohen sang). The wound of light, the crack that saves us from the black hole, forces one to renounce completion. What painters seek to capture, perhaps, is precisely the crack, what is not there, something that belongs to the time before what is there, and to the time that will come after. So the problem with painting (as María Zambrano wrote) is not space but time. The problem is trying to understand the nature of this problem. Anyone who paints hopes never to understand it.

Perhaps a pregnant woman understands something of this. Behind the back of the clock, in a furious calm, guardian of time, she loses it measure. She says nothing. She has nothing to say. Just to be on the safe side, we would do well to make her a witness, to have her take charge of all the fleeing figures that erase the horizon.

Mariano Anós

More information

A Glimpse within: New Horizons in the Personal Geography of the Beulas-Sarrate Collection is a project curated by Chus Tudelilla.

To access details on the exhibition, the biography of Mariano Anós, and information on other A Glimpse Within exhibition projects, click on the following link:

•  A Glimpse Within project – CDAN web site

Source: texts – CDAN and Mariano Anós; photograph of the work Caligrafía vertical by Antoni Tàpies, Beulas-Sarrate Collection, CDAN Fundación Beulas.

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