Imagining a city
Imagine a city of beautiful walls. They surprise us with their beauty as we go about our lives. As we walk, quite out of the blue, an expanse of wall, textured for a particular effect. Minimalistic, except for little touches of detail. The walls need not say anything much for us to love them. They need not be very busy. We are all already inclined to walls. We are wired that way. After all, walls have been essential to the whole idea of civilization itself.
They are monuments to recall the time we stopped roaming the Earth as nomadic cultures. As soon as we decided to plant and raise animals, we marked ourselves by the quality of the walls we built. Walls have lasted until today. They will last well into the future. They affect us in a peculiar way although we might not even realize it. Walls are a powerful means of communication between us. And if we wanted to beautify a city, we would do well to start with beautifying our walls.
Imagine a wall, not necessarily a big one. It has to be lighted just so, not too intensely and most certainly warm. Now imagine a painting on the wall. It is not too big. It is not a painting that expresses even the slightest hubris. Indeed, the painting is softspoken. It does not rush at us. Instead it entices us to move closer and see its story.
And there would be story here. Though some of us still say: I don’t understand. What after all is there to understand from this play of strokes and colors which hangs from this wall? There is a field of pale blue violet grey in the background. It gives us soft reassurance that this thing we are looking at is on a flat surface. It is in itself also a wall.
And over this wall of grey, a splash of the faintest yellow. It is a smooth curve moving left to right and bottom up. It is a calligraphic stroke made by a brush that must have been huge. And yet, it tells of a line describing a single gesture, a swing of the arm. As in a dance. Swoosh, disappearing finally as the artist lifts his hand away from the wall’s surface.
There must be a counter stroke. The gesture calls for it. And so a splash of transparent red. It describes a rectangle inside the larger rectangle of the painting. It is not red which screams. It is a soft diaphanous glaze. And over all these, a flurry of playful linear strokes, strong, incising, cutting. They invite us to look even closer into this world so we might see into its surface. It is this surface which tell us of the painter who did these acts.
He who dared to ask: Why should the painting tell us once again of Red Riding Hood or Humpty Dumpty? Why can’t the painting be what it really is? Paper, canvas, paint, brushes, knives, strokes, spaces of light and color, lines. They are beautiful even when they do not tell us of Red and Humpty. They are beautiful by themselves. And what they tell us is a story of acts that plumb into a human being’s deepest parts: his joys, his anguish, the fact of his life. Where it began. Where it ended.
You will not, of course, hear this story told the same way you might read a perfectly beautiful rhyme. The art work itself are only spaces of color, strokes and line. You might say: This painting is entirely abstract. And yet they are entirely more real than most of the things we read. Words are abstract. Each word has to mean something to mean anything at all. Not so this painting. It is sitting there just being what it is. And yet, it is beautiful only to those who would give it a chance. We are free to overlook this painting completely. It is not out to prove itself nor win a contest.
It is simply here. To mirror the person who made it. To recall for us only his tentative presence. It is something to imagine him by. And we might ask: How does a man learn to do art like this? What drove him? And how was it he survived all this time in a city where there are only a few beautiful walls, most of them, inaccessible to ordinary people? He must have been a person of great courage. He must have belonged to a community. How honored he must have been.
But now the painting finally tells us to move backwards so we might review what we have seen. We take in the painting in its entirety, as a single holistic visual whole. See how it hangs from this wall completing its beauty. We could look at this for still a while longer but in time we must go. Before leaving, we must remind ourselves to find the signature, the mark of the man who did this art: Tito Cuevas, 2012.
