The Sight Of An Old Man Seeking Its Revelation

What you see in an image, which is always concrete and individualized, depends on what you see in yourself in a way contrary to time.

All that I see around me, the sea, the waves, the sand, the small shells, the beach bathed in the rays of the summer sun, is only embodied with such realism in the wisdom of an old man who, clearly feeling nature as a kind of eternal force, alive and universal, recognizes its smallness in front of the greatness of a road that leads to the unknown. Beyond the comparison of some mystical influences from the stylistics of an image particularly imprinted in my imagination, which seems to hide something, the absence and the absent, me with myself and in me, lies the uncertainty of standing still in a time of not forgetting.

The sun, perhaps the most beautiful stationary figure in illuminati symbolism, you could say is a hiker who, coming from afar, exhausted by fatigue, stops in front of an oasis to cool his soul. Only the sea removes the excess heat of the sun, while on me, like a material burden, presses the noir of an internalized time, lived in the parallel universe of nostalgia, dreaming and tenderness.

The wisdom of the old man is continuously shown in this scenario of nostalgia, in a perpetual search for new shapes and colors intended to complete as perfectly as possible the decoration scheme of an image that has passed the test of time. And if I tried to decorate the code of time again with unforgettable memories, the old man would only have to go in search of the perfection of the picture dictated by the quality of the image passed through the continuous color test, so as to perpetuate the emotions generated by that dreaming, continuous and innocent, which still enriches his reality.

Is the image with which you test your life memory visible from the outside of a creation that loves its creator so much that it absorbs him within it?

I still can’t quite figure out if the sharp vision, open to the beautiful, so eager to encompass the horizon, is conveniently supported by the relationship between the reception of a double face of the imaginary and the reception of a work of art in a given space. One thing is certain: up there, in the clearness of the sky, where time flows according to other patterns, not a single cloud seems bloodied by the metamorphoses of the real in which old age bends to something of human passions, like reeds in the wind.

In his notes about a painter, the painter Henri Matisse, on the threshold of old age, specified: “Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements, at the command of the painter, in order for him to express his feelings.”

I agree with him. Looking at the seascape, as it is given by the beauty of nature, I more easily develop my art towards the mastery of a style that moves somewhat away from the universalist tendencies of modernist abstraction. Even despite the limitations imposed by the language of sight, or even sensing the deathless state of things, the old artist will not be able to free himself from the burden of comparison, which involves bringing the 4 components of the painting (color, tone, line, shape) at the stage of geometrized appearances, bearing accentuated symbols. This even if in art the illusion is a creation of the union of the 4 fundamental components which, in turn, can have as a neutral correspondent the 4 zodiac signs: earth, water, fire and air.

Are you ready to make the leap from the visual-static image you show to the world, to that realistic stage in your existence where you encounter the contrast between appearance and essence?

Still making references to art, beyond the comparison of artistic influences, I remember a sequence from a beautiful book by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. The old artist convinces a desperate young man, on the verge of suicide, to restore his existence on one condition: to transform it into a work of art. After all, he has nothing to lose but freedom. The old man turned to the young man. He held out his hand, lighting up his face, and his wrinkles disappeared into a smile, to once again form the face of a young man with delicate features. Before long, with his new identity as a living statue, Adam became more famous than Gioconda.

The only way to be someone else in art is to perceive the sea as a being that lives fully, although you only know its image from unclear or at least inconclusive vestiges.

Of course, when I look at the expanse of the sea, enveloped by its soft and salty whispers, especially when the waves polish the stones making them smooth and silky to the touch, I realize that the last cycle of human life does not end with that moment of peace in full storm, but with a sad discovery: I could have been more than I was.

You can feel this painful emotion on the old man’s face, not only looking at the sea as a possibility to relax the mind, but associating it with the end of youth, seeing it as a limit of the decline of responsibility, a border beyond which you don’t want to cross, a gap beyond which you can expect either disaster or salvation.

Leadership connects to the age of great symbolic routes: you start from the place where you feel yourself, real and present, and end up taking the place of an image of illusion accentuated by the contrast between the space of absolute freedom and the constraints of a memory that far exceeds your own existence.

The sea, the peaceful place of nostalgia, but burdened with memories, is an impulse to return, to return to yourself at least for a temporary eternity. She easily finds her correspondence with personalities from the art world who wanted to capture in their creation the space of “youth without old age”. Not to mention that the expanse of the sea from which sadness rises, captured in the painting by the distant shadow of a lost boat, or anchored at sea, often captures an age beyond which life is a little different.

The Sight Of An Old Man Seeking Its Revelation is an emotional magnifying glass that you use without realizing the effects of an overdose of reality, when you create in yourself the image of the desired one.

If you want to be someone else, first you have to meet the old man whose image can be perceived as a metaphor for the sea: you have to feel as if you were an island on which there is a ruined castle. To restore his splendor you must draw him more beautiful than ever, depicting him as a dream, as an optical illusion, even if the reality is that his time is over.

You have to recognize your fragility in leadership, looking at the reality in front. Old age is a sandcastle that can only be blown away by a breeze. Or, as Jimi Hendrix said: “All castles built in the sand fall into the sea eventually.”