Push up tight to my heart please

Good disease, Aim. Listen here.

Americas

Paulo Nazareth das Americas.

Soy loco por ti, America, Caetano Veloso. Listen here.

Babies

Radiation City, Babies. Listen here.

Into the maze

迷宮 meikyuu

“An artist speaks as if he were the first person ever to speak and paints as if nobody has ever painted before him. Thus, expression cannot be an interpretation of a previously well established concept. This is so because for a thought to be clear it must be a thought that I myself or others have already uttered. Conception cannot precede action. What exists prior to expression is something ambiguous, like temperature. The only work that can prove that there is something, rather than nothing, which necessitates discovery is the one which has been created and understood. Artists are the ones who return to the desolate soil of experience without words so that they may bring this into consciousness.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, Gallimard , Paris, 1953)

Ready to reload

Jiro Yoshihara, White Circle, 1965, Work B, 1971

C’mon, babe, you know the drill: let’s go back for more. Encircling the force of life. Five pages a day, pure unabashed intuitive thought. Ready to reload.

Yantra

Yantra is the simplest mandala (literally, “object serving to hold”, “instrument”, “engine”). Is is a diagram drawn or engraved on metal, wood, stone, paper, or simply traced on the ground or a wall. (…) The yantra is an expression, in terms of linear symbolism, of the cosmic manifestations, beginning with the primordial unity.  (…) The mandala defends against any destructive force (…), it defends consciousness against the disintegrating forces of the unconscious (…). Since the mandala is an imago mundi, its centre corresponds to the infinitesimal point perpendicularly traversed by the axis mundi, and entrance into a mandala resembles every “march toward the centre”. (…) The yôgin can discover the mandala in his own body, transformed into a series of meditations on the various “centers” and subtle organs. (…) According to Jung the mandalas represent structures of the deep psyche; mandalas appear in insights  that encompass the accomplishment of a successful conclusion on the central process of the unconscious that Jung called process of individuation.  (Eliade, M, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, pp. 219-227)

Ashtánga Yantra

“The ashtánga yantra is the symbol of SwáSthya Yôga. Its origins go back to the most archaic cultures of India and of the planet. Part of its structure is explained on the Shástra Yantra Chintamani. It constitutes a true shield of protection, ballasted on archetypes of the collective unconscious.”

(DeRose – Tratado de Yôga – Ed. Nobel)

Heart

My hands are my heart, Gabriel Orozco

Geometry and abstraction 2

“Geometry is born from the reflection of the body on my mind” (Lygia Clark)

(works by Fernando Diniz, in exh. cat. The images of the Unconscious, 2000)

The motivation to understand the remarkable absence of figurative representations on the plastic production of schizophrenics and, conversely, the predominance of abstraction, stylization and geometric drawing is described by Nise da Silveira while observing her patients: “I watched them painting. I saw their grimacing faces. I was attentive to the furor that would take hold of their hands. I had the impression that they were living ‘nameless and always more dangerous states of being’. It was impossible for me in fact to accept the prevailing opinion according to which all non-figurative painting should mean erasure of affectivity and tendency to the dissolution of the real”. While she empirically realized the “impossibility of establishing codes, for abstract language creates itself at every instant”, she acknowledged that “at the hospital, geometric drawing gave evidence of the instinctive efforts invested to appease the emotional disorders and also revealed a search for security that could be expressed through stable constructions”. She went as far as to comment that “in Latin America, the inorganic and the organic, reason and feeling, are close to each other, in the search for balance” (SILVEIRA, 2005: 11, 14, 16, 23).

Geometry and abstraction 1

Imanaka Kumiko

Work, 1965.

“On the occasion of the 15th Gutai Art Exhibition, held at the Gutai Pinacotheca in 1965, a large group of artists were welcomed to Gutai as new members. (…) In the world of Japanese abstract art at the time, new types of expression were beginning to emerge in place of the Art Informel style of aggressive actions and emphasis on the raw corporeality of the materials. One prominent trend was the rise of boldly abstract, geometrical work, Not only were these “cool abstractions”, as they were commonly known, a backlash against the “hot abstractions” of Art Informel, they were also a clear sign of the times in Japan, which was entering a period of high-economic growth and quickly becoming a society with a strong faith in technology. Some of the new Gutai members enthusiastically embraced new industrial materials like stainless steel and plastic” ( SOICHI, Hirai, 2004, What’s Gutai, p. 134).