Landscape with Red Spots  c.1913, Wassily Kandinsky

“Art only begins where imitation ends”

Oscar Wilde De Profundis

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Dear Wassily,

A yellow circle not in the middle of the canvas but slightly to the left to bring us close

To this space you’ve created, an elevated platform.

From this place of altitude colors vibrate in different frequencies

Each one seems new and placed in some kind of harmonic order between the others. Greens and yellows, and blues and some kinds of purples loose their names

And incognito venture and echo in some unnamed corner inside myself

Like animals finding their shadows in remote places

The first time I heard about you was in a painting class in middle school, my friend, trying to be defiant started playing with colors on the canvas, and what at first seemed like a joke ended up devouring him completely. All of his attention was engaged in composition, this color here, this other one there, this color a line, this other the shape of an egg, the teacher said, “Oh, that’s nice that looks like a Kandinsky”.

Dear Wassily Kandinsky,

I went to the zoo and all the animals were asleep. The spider monkeys, the pumas, the bears, the eagle, all of them. It was noon. What a beautiful spectacle, sleeping animals. I thought well that would be a nice subject for a series of paintings, sleeping animals, the series could be called “Zoo at Noon”, or “Look, they sleep!” or “The Zoo of the Sleeping Beasts”. Somebody was asking their children “what do you think they dream about?”, I said “Kandinsky” to myself.

“Are animals capable of abstraction?” the children replied. “No matter”, I said. Would their dreams really look like lines and circles of colors painted by a russian painter of the early 20th century? Of course not.

what is abstraction? Is it one of those things better understood as the opposite of _____? Is realism the opposite of abstraction? Realism, meaning the artist paints what is in front of him to the best of his ability, be it a pile of fruit, or the face of a handsome gentleman, or tennagers playing half naked in the river. And where some painters tried to hide their strokes to bring forward the beauty of nature in the still life, or the portrait, or the landscape, you made your trace the principal object of reckoning; it’s color, it’s shape, it’s force, reminding us that the most important thing is not that nature is beautiful but that human can find it so, feel it so, precieve it so, imagine it so. That is the elevated platform; there is something beyond imitation and that is creation, an expression of inner beauty, which is in itself another kind of beauty. Not a beauty with a practical purpose, or meaning, but just beauty for itself. Inner fire.

“A very simple movement, whose purpose is unknown, produces of it’s own accord a significant, mysterious, and solemn effect. This provided that one is unaware of the external, practical purpose of the movement, then it has the effect of a pure sound… In this simple movement, which to all external appearances is unmotivated, lies an immeasurable wealth of possibilities.”

A red short vertical line. And beyond its edges the space in between, also vibrating, becoming alive by the elements of the composition.

The work of the artist: abstracting the object from its predetermined meaning and practicality and offering it as the object itself which can resonate on another level other than the mundane, and can itself become a point of relativity. This is profound because there is something beyond the geometrical in your paintings, and this is the most exquisite part; you believe that through the masterful composition of the very elements of painting there can be a spiritual communication, a subtle relationship that the spectator can experience standing in front of the painting, and this experience is a communion between the artist, the viewer and the ineffable. A lavender triangle vibrating, three points forming a plane.  

Well I’ve felt that, I’ve stood in front of your paintings for hours, in that space, in that elevated platform. A pasture, a big plain, big sky!  

“The artist must have something to say, for his task is not the mastery of form, but the suitability of that form to it’s content”

“It is of course, clear that we here are talking the education of the soul… The true work of art comes about in a mysterious way. No, if the soul of the artist is alive, then there is no need to bolster it with cerebration and theories. It will find something to say of it’s own accord, something that may, at that moment, remain unclear even to the artist himself.”

The abstract re-frames reality by bringing down walls, it asks of us to surrender ontological paradigms and exist in outer space. Infinity. Freedom at last.

“Outside.

Quite vast. And wide.

Sputnik 9 lost it’s orbit and __________________________________”

Thank you my friend.

A blue sinuous line that spreads itself unevenly, almost horizontally, near the bottom right corner to say

Farewell,

N