Art Trapped In The Lost Horizon Of The Self

The man who fails to make himself understood and to pass on his emotions is the man who fails to bring to light “the form concealed by the material”.

Yesterday afternoon. As I was walking towards the house, passing by a terrace on Alexandru Lăpușneanu Street, my gaze stopped on a strange individual. It was impossible not to notice him, something gave me the impression that he wanted to be noticed, not only by the way he gestured, but by the fact that at the same time he had somehow adopted a disapproving attitude towards all the other people around him. You know, that kind of man who wants to get everyone’s attention but at the same time doesn’t care what people think of him? Well, this pattern of calm, jovial individuality was at that table then.

He was like a sensitive object that refuses to satisfy a need for finishing. An object in which relief is found precisely by the satisfaction of the selfish feeling of another man, selfish because he seeks in another man his own essence.

Combined with a tender and profound poetic realism, the attitude of the targeted individual could be measured by the way he kept his left foot on the seat next to him, correlated with that disease of the sick ego that makes the person affected by any emotional disorder place themselves in the spotlight. He seemed to be the kind of person who made the conscious decision to focus on the miraculous side of pain, a kind of avoidance of negative self-image used to determine a possible success in social life, by realizing the danger of “stiffness” in the victim role of any discrimination or deprivation.

Do you tend to constantly distinguish between “empty form” and “real content” without losing the support of the idea of the predominance of life?

And as he kept his foot on the left chair, not caring that anyone else would later sit in that chair, waving an overestimated expression of self-satisfaction in front of the interlocutor, I remembered myself many years ago. And so it was easy for me to figure out what he was feeling, what he believed, what he was thinking, what he was after, what was inspiring him, what life could bring him.

In fact, his attitude is easy to identify with an artist who carries in him everything that represents life, but who puts unfinished images all around him. A passionate artist, with a life trajectory full of traps and wanderings, able to combine in a unique way the mysteries of illusionism with false good mood.

And I looked at this man in passing, I looked at him silently without him noticing the look that measured his soul. Discreet, with the allure of the man who issues value judgments, integrated with who knows what impulses coming from outside, the man in the foreground of my sight manifests himself like the painter who loads the brush with too much paint to avoid a second layer, and so the paint will continue to fade unevenly on the surface of the canvas, or it will leave small drops everywhere. His manner of appearance, the way he gestured, his attire, all betrayed a deep internal crisis that postulated the study of factual relations as the exclusive domain of a basis of comparison between reality and kitsch.

Can you change the state of being of a hard to define experiential content, based on the premise that what you see is relevant before you choose to believe?

More than likely, he is not a man who has lost the support of the idea of the predominance of life: the ability to be happy with what he already has. But, waking up on a blurred horizon of the self, he seemed to compare his inner crisis with the soul of an artist (dominated by a great will of visual renewal) who fails to make himself understood and does not transmit the emotion further, who fails to brings to light the shape that the material hides. So, knowingly and ostentatiously, he continues to look for new ways to convey non-verbal, more bodily messages.

Or, maybe he had something in common with that Romanian artist, Ştefan Luchian, who, when faced with the unforgettable experiences of maturation, the burden of the pain he bared, the material shortcomings, the vengeful envy of his colleagues, gave up art for good and started “wildlife”.

Does the all-encompassing feeling that gives you the strength to get carried away require the adequacy of the relationship between the vision of an image painted with an unusual story and the appearance of an object that is self-sufficient?

And the man was sitting at the table like he was at home. In no case could he prove to be a famous messenger of the intellectuals, he seemed rather a fragment of unfinished painting that fascinates with its discretionary aspect, but also with the oscillation between certainty and uncertainty – suggested by a dialogue that did not seem to bring to life any emotion, but shedding light on what it means to live with depression or anxiety. At one point I felt like he was talking to himself about that side of the tragic hero in a novel by John Fowles:

“I used to have a sense of guilt because I spent too much time studying the past. I saw my creations in the form of high waves, so as not to see what I did not want to understand. Now I see that anything can serve as a wave, if one wants it be so. The fear was physical, material, that some thief would’ve crept into my thoughts and attacked me in moments of loneliness, and in this manner, in moments of deep sincerity. I have experienced this before, but it has not been repeated with the same intensity. It’s very strange, like an interruption of time.”

In that short and fleeting moment, my only challenge was to unravel the meanings of an artistic destiny, behind the motley picture made up of the sum of all the special features to which human life tends. Because his very way of displaying his personality in an ostentatious but somewhat lax way, proved the inner turmoil, the oscillation between optimism and pessimism that could only harm him, causing imbalances and alienations, even identity pathologies. And if I exercised the power of my imagination a little more, testing my sensitive impression, I would see the usual struggle of a man tilting at windmills, which, however, produces fear and depression.

Leadership is that feeling of responsibility given by man’s confrontation with one’s self, with a man who did not play with life, but imposed on life to accept its own limits.

The Art Contained In The Lost Horizon Of The Self highlights the means of expressing a wounded ego that seeks social validation, but which wholeheartedly refuses to control a distorted reality.

I think that the writer Liviu Rusu was right when he said: “The artist differs from the ordinary man only in terms of the intensity of his psychic functions. Their creation would be a download of these functions. In fact, art begins with the analysis of simple forms of gestural expression, based exclusively on the virtues of coloristic language, taking into account the impulses received from life.”