Andrea Galvani, La Morte di Un'Immagine #9 (2006)
Have you ever witnessed something so beautiful it makes you angry? Something that makes you angry because it blows your entire scale, because it makes your delicate struggles for harmony ridiculous, petty, insignificant? This beauty that should elevate you, that should lift you up and carry you through the night, the beauty that is the inspiration and the core, is its exact opposite: smashing, unbearable, hard and cruel. It is a sunset that is just too magical, stars that shine too bright, or an event that seemed like the best of all performances. But what I mean is not perfection, it is beauty. It is not unnerving because it doesn't allow you to access it, like the perfection of the stone. It is unnerving because it takes away your ability to judge it, or what's worse, it's a type of beauty that takes away your ability to include it into your appreciation of beauty. It makes it silly to think of art, to create, to go to galleries and museums, to scan art blogs and dwelve into poetry. It leaves you lonely, ridiculously hanging on to an outdated scale or desperately trying to adapt it to something that corresponds more to what Kant calls the sublime - although the problem is, it is not sublime, it is exactly what beauty could have been, had you not already developed a different scale altogether.
I'm lucky: I forget. The taste fades quite quickly from my mouth, the text evaporates from my head, and so does the view of the sea after the storm. It all starts again for me, and what is left is like a bookmark, a sign that says "this was good" and maybe, maybe manages to reproduce some sort of a sensation of a sensation I had when it happened.
And then, sometimes, if one focuses on this memory, the memory starts growing a new head, one that is nothing like the previous one. One that does not compete in these subjective beauty contests, one that is at once much more raw and more constructed, that uses your imagination but somehow fits it together with whatever surrounds you, adapting the memory into an idea, transforming it into this weird creature that still has the body of a horse, but instead of the head has grown a thick, black cloud. Of balloons.
Delicious.
Thank you Andrea Galvani.
(via)
