The Aesthetics of An Astral Experience (I)

Be prepared for a long journey around the world, seeking inspiring sources in others’ style of building a "forward".

I have seen much in the long period of my life, to encompass the universe during an interruption of the clock, through its experimental, temporal and ephemeral character, but with great openness to observing history through the vigilant eye of a realistic artist. The gift of being everywhere, the need for steadiness and the deepening of almost forgotten reality, the values of a universal theme, translated into a distinct expressive autonomy perceived by the object to which it fulfills the spatial boundaries, are immanent to the processes of visual perception.

Dependence on a conception with specific limits, that of self-knowledge following the reflection of a mirror that magnifies every detail of life favorable to the creation of a work of great value, is the only way to communicate that something always beyond all possible attributes to the superlative, literary and aesthetic. Something I can only convey deeply and persistently to the ineffable murmur of a forgotten conversation with God.

Throughout history, we have permanently experienced these two forms of life, by themselves an authentic fervor stemming from the beliefs of an esthetician who can forever wipe away all the signs that time has left behind, but he does not do it because of the beauty of an ideal called simply: immortality. One that comes from the common fund of all the crazy events through which mankind has passed, evident from a sphere of perennial values, and a differential one that has been created on this basis.

And as reality has to be expressed in artistic terms, without which the expressive virtues of the line and the extent of the symbolic relations expressed as a means of language could not exist, then I can formulate it as follows: each element becomes stronger by contrast with another element.

Do you take into account that state of being everywhere in the image chosen as the background of existence by expressly defining the notion of "circumstance" on which the values of universal constants are based?

I first met Master Rembrandt, a shy and silent man, under the dark canopy of the vanity of this world, trying to improve his chiaroscuro technique. He was "the only painter who could afford to mix the mud with the brightness of eyes, fire with ashes, or make the colors freshly shine." I have not stopped wondering how a man who has been troubled by so many worries and so much poverty has been able to bring more information and profoundness to shaping the historical image than King Solomon who was unparalleled in wealth and wisdom.

In the history of the Battle of Austerlitz, known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, one of Napoleon’s greatest victories, I made myself noticed through the fierceness with which the look of the painter François Gérard wanted to achieve that unique fixed space-time frame, despite the dynamism of a nation in full extension, by immortalizing the reflexive, determined and visionary nature of a god in his unique magnificence.

My story continues as in 1001 nights, a slave took my hand and took me to a hall that was only adorned with beauty and lines and perfection, to "The Terrace of the Seraglio", where painter Jean-Leon Gerome captured the most vibrant moment of a forgotten era.

When you are caught in the living mirage of the universe, the only way to fix reality is the color that you attribute to the subject of a life that is a part of you.

Undoubtedly, I have lived a quite agitated previous life. I was there when the Achaeans were able to enter the besieged city, with the trickery of the Trojan horse, indiscriminately massacring the inhabitants of Troy and desecrating temples, a gesture that later drew the wrath of the gods. I did not miss the fall of Constantinople, when Sultan Mehmet declared that he was "the only law", and that God is not even able to disprove his power with the earthly people.

Perhaps I am one of those who, at all times, continued to live, because the universe always leaves behind a remnant of its mysterious boundlessness to scatter less than one hundredth of its mass into the conscience of mortals. However, no artist has been able to capture my presence over the centuries, even though my two constants – persistence and recurrence – extend to those written in the books of eternity.

Sometimes I feel like a sea of which I have understood only a wave, like the artist who is detached from the events of reality, immersing himself in a kind of empty space to imaginatively reconstruct a history, worldly passages towards a unique experience of knowledge which gives him the chance to reconstitute himself as a kind of "secret keeper" in the abyss of a time without time.

Only God has a resonance on the man lost in a world that eternally relives its past, like a ball spinning around its own axis, until He himself gets replaced by a man. But not by any man, by a grandiose artist of the sublime in the art of exploring new realms, seen as a prior totalization of experience in time and space.

The soul seems to be ruled by the same sense of predestination experienced by Mika Waltari’s hero:

"I, Turms, the immortal, think it will be so. Even if what I wrote will disappear, even if the ink dissolves, even if the reed paper is broken, even if the languages in which I have written will be erased from the memory of the people, writing these words, I bound each stone of life to the happenings I want to remember. I will find myself when I return."

The need for steadfastness and deepening of spiritual reality is the experience that you experience at the moment of a departure from things worldly culminating in the closeness to things immortal.

The Aesthetics Of An Astral Experience is the testimony of a life dedicated to art, on two parallel planes – of creation by image and of writing by remembrance of secular, millenary information that we have come to forget.

The only possible experience, unlimited in infinite time and space, poured into a universal vibration, is the attempt to reconstruct history by ingeniously exploiting the relationship between imagination and reality, transposed into an image that turns the life of some into a truly immortal story.