terça-feira, 24 de abril de 2018

Finalmente à venda

Na próxima quinta-feira, pelas 18.30h, em Évora, durante o Encontro Nacional da APEAA, Antonio Sáez-Delgado apresenta. A 14 de Maio, pelas 18.30h, em Lisboa, na Imprensa Nacional, apresenta Isabel Pires de Lima.

Sugestão de leitura

Para quem esteja interessado em reflectir, com seriedade, rigor e densidade, sobre os tempos que correm, e a identidade europeia, em particular, aqui vos deixo a sugestão de leitura de um texto que não se deve ignorar,Radix, Matrix - Community Belonging and the Ecclesial Form of Universalistic Communitarism, de Teresa Bartolomei.

sexta-feira, 13 de abril de 2018

Atenção, Americanistas!

Nestes versos do Uncle Bob, é o Manifest Destiny que ecoa, não é verdade? "Oh the history books tell it/ They tell it so well/ The cavalries charged/ The Indians fell/ The cavalries charged/ The Indians died/ Oh the country was young/ With God on its side." Mas é preciso ler o resto para percepcionar o debunking.

segunda-feira, 9 de abril de 2018

Evangelho segundo Lucas

revisitado pelo grande Dante Gabriel Rossetti em "Ecce Ancilla Domini!".
A sua irmã Christina, inspirou a sua figuração de Maria, e o seu irmão William Michael, a do anjo Gabriel. De notar o modo como ele representa a perturbação de Maria. Eis o passo de Lucas: "Naquele tempo, o Anjo Gabriel foi enviado por Deus a uma cidade da Galileia chamada Nazaré, a uma Virgem desposada com um homem chamado José, que era descendente de David. O nome da Virgem era Maria. Tendo entrado onde ela estava, disse o Anjo: «Ave, cheia de graça, o Senhor está contigo». Ela ficou perturbada com estas palavras e pensava que saudação seria aquela."

(Turner) Um apontamento

de Andrew Graham-Dixon a propósito das aguarelas feitas por Turner aquando da sua estadia na mansão do patrono das artes George O'Brien Wyndham em Petworth: "The watercolours he painted during hi several visits to Petworth amount to a diary of the house. They are full of enigmatic details which, filtered through Turner, combine the mundane with the phantasmal. An unmade bed, no one in it, becomes a scarlet apparition of sensuality, sexiness transmuted into sheer, heavy color. Billiard players [primeira imagem] loom as black and strange silhouettes out of a sunburst of light and color. To look through Turner's painted journal is to see him suddenly and marvelously accelerate towards the brilliance of his maturity. (...) Many of his Petworth works are watercolours, and this marks the moment when he realized that the watercolour was central to his art, not a peripheral, minor form of as it was generally regarded at the time. He began to import the effects of watercolour into oil painting, a process which reached its first fluid climax in a large oil painting called Interior at Petworth [segunda imagem]." (Andrew Graham-Dixon, A History of British Art)

quinta-feira, 5 de abril de 2018

Uma leitura algo ousada

A instalação - chamemos-lhe assim - intitulada An Oak Tree, de Craig-Martin, exposta na Tate Modern, é acompanhada da seguinte "explicação". Leiam e vejam se concordam: "An Oak Tree is based on the concept of transubstantiation, the notion central to the Catholic faith in which it is believed that bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ while retaining their appearances of bread and wine. The ability to believe that an object is something other than its physical appearance indicates requires a transformative vision." Refere Gordon Graham que An Oak Tree foi enviada, devidamente acondicionada, para a Austrália de modo a integrar uma exposição. No entanto, o Ministério da Agricultura impediu a sua entrada ao abrigo da protecção de espécimens botânicos. Os curadores argumentaram que não se tratava propriamente de uma árvore. Ora, católico algum utilizaria argumento idêntico a propósito de uma Hóstia.

O historicismo de Kandinsky

na esteira de Hegel, com umas ressonâncias do nosso amigo Ralph Waldo Emerson: Every work of art is a child of its time ... It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own, which cannot be repeated. Effort to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child. For example, it is impossible for us to live and feel as did the ancient Greeks. For this reason those who follow Greek principles in sculpture reach only a similarity of form, while the work remains for all time without a soul.

'Lovers on a park bench' uit 'Einstein on the beach'

A propósito do subtil tópico

dos limites do olhar de quem concebe um retrato, esclarece Collingwood: A portrait ... is a work of representation. What the patron demands is a good likeness; and that is what the painter aims at, and successfully, if he is a competent painter, at producing. It is not a difficult thing to do; and we may reasonably assume that in portraits by great painters such as Raphael, Titian, Velasquez, or Rembrandt it has been done. But, however reasonable the assumption may be, it is an assumption and nothing more. The sitters are dead and gone, and we cannot check the likeness for ourselves. If, therefore, the only kind of merit a portrait could have were its likeness to the sitter, we could not possibly distinguish, except where the sitter is still alive and unchanged, between a good portrait and a bad.

Como nos vai lembrando o nosso quotidiano

Alexander Pope tinha razão quando afirmava: People who know a little about a subject are often strongly inclined to believe themselves to be expert. Vejam ainda, nesta linha, estes versos seus: A little learning is a dang'rous thing;/ Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:/ There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,/ And drinking largely sobers us again.