Alexandra Blaison

Should you care to read on Gerhard Richter, I did put a few thoughts down on the subject. For those of you in Paris, his retrospective opens tomorrow at the Fondation Vuitton.
thepaperdrop.substack.com/p/on-gerhard...

In 1975, Richter depicted the duo Gilbert and George from a series of multiple exposure photographs of the artists. The works achieved a striking sense of motion and atmospheric blur, challenging the belief that such effects could be obtained from oil on canvas.

Raúl Zurita, translated by Anna Deeny

🍂🍃

‘Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive, right here, feeling lucky.’

Jean Tinguely & Eugène lonesco, Drawing made with a Meta-matic (1959)

Erika Meitner

Borges on Writing:
“one should work into a story the idea of not being sure of all things, because that’s the way reality is”
- Jorge Luis Borges

a space of the unknowable 💕
“One of the things for me about free jazz or experimental jazz, or not just jazz but experimentation within the arts, where we can go with it and what it can do, is that there has to be a space of the unknowable for us to feel we can venture into.”
- Sonia Boyce

Giuseppe Verdi to Clarina Maffei on December 29, 1872:

“Dear Clarina,
Good morning and a happy new year— that is to say, good health and peace! Peace! The best thing in this world, and the thing that I desire most at this moment.”

I wrote some reflections on Verdi’s Aida and Shirin Neshat’s political remaking of the opera that you can read here bit.ly/4nT2UVs on The Paper Drop ➰

“Art is always self-parading, I think. Always was, always will be.
Is there something wrong with the self? I parade as much as I can.”
―Paul Thek, postcard to Robert Pincus-Witten, 1969

#FromTheNotebook

In James Baldwin’s words: “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. ... Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.”

"Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion."

James Baldwin forever.

Some thoughts I've written on ‘Alberto Giacometti and the Existentialists’ that you can read here
thepaperdrop.substack.com/p/alberto-gi...

“Someday our bodies will no longer matter,
and we will leave them in our sleep, to travel easily.”➰

Marlene Dumas and the Politics of Sorrow

Some reflections I've written on Marlene Dumas' exhibition Cycladic Blues that you can read here bit.ly/46sNNLx

“I like to begin where winds shake the first branch.”
-Odysseus Elytis ➰

“Have you ever seen anything in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon…”
- The Sun by Mary Oliver

#FromtheNotebook ✨

O body o summer, naked, burnt
Eaten away by oil and salt
Body of rock and shudder of the heart
Great ruffling wind in the osier hair
Beneath of basil above the curly pubic mound
Full of stars and pine needles
Body, deep vessel of the day!
-Odysseus Elytis, Body of Summer
Tr. E. Keeley & P. Sherrard

in fragments 🔸

Today, my hope is vertical.
Tomorrow it will be horizontal.
The next day, cloudy.
My hope is like a Greek myth:
exchanging skin for bark,
bark for scales,
scales for the hollow bones of a bird.
- Jane Hirshfield, TODAY, MY HOPE IS VERTICAL

#FromtheNotebook

"Profuse light; splendour. Summer asserts itself and compels every soul to happiness."
- André Gide, Journal (1943)

#SummerWriting

"Shadow is a color, like light, but less bright; light and shadow are only the relationship between two tones." ➰
- Paul Cézanne

#art

In the recent Matisse–Marguerite show, one work held me: Marguerite with a Black Cat. Exhibited from Berlin Secession 1910 to the Armory Show 1913, it remained with Matisse until his death. On International Cat Day, what better tribute than to recall the cat in the portrait? It’s a famous #cat. 🐈‍⬛

In Antonello da Messina’s Crucifixion
Painting, I am the one on the right.
I am hanging like that,
My back is arched like that,
I am facing the real God,
I am unknown and will be forgotten,
But I am there, too, and my body is
Open to all the pain of life.
— Preservation, Sylvie Baugartel #Ekphrasis

On this day, shall we remember Paul Claudel, the writer & brother to the brilliant Camille Claudel?

One of my favorite lines of his is the one where contradictions are in harmony:

‘Order is the pleasure of reason, but disorder is the delight of the imagination.’
— #paulclaudel

#bornonthisday

I could underline every line, there isn’t a sentence I wouldn’t keep. ➰ #books

A gentle reminder ➰

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience."

- Mary Oliver

I’ve recently returned to the work of Giovanni Battista Moroni, but it’s this detail from his Portrait of Alessandro Vitoria that continues to haunt me: an image of distilled precision, where a quiet dialogue between maker and medium seems to unfold.

#arthistory