NAU NUA

2012-02-24T11:45:00.000-08:00

NAU NUA FEBRUARY 2012

SUMMARY

FRONT COVER Adrienne Jalbert. Nude ship on an empty sea

HOM

Antoni Tàpies
Life

Wislawa Szymborska
The fog between the numbers

Theo Angelopoulos
A time with no dimensions

NAU

Béla Tarr. The Turin Horse
From crying to discouragement

Glenn Close. Albert Nobbs
Faithful to herself

Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala. 1395 days without red
Double-deal

NUA

The Goon Show
Could we take a taxi for breakfast?

ENVERS

Jillian Edelstein
Looking for a meaning

Jennifer Hall
Because the world is blue

ESBÓS

Antoni Tàpies
Retrospective

Theo Angelopoulos
The dust of time

Jillian Edelstein
Retrospective

Ioana Moldovan
Between the click of the light and the start of a dream

Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala
1395 days without red

Michel Ocelot
Les contes de la nuit

MOT in Spanish

Albert Pérez
El regreso

MOS

Ulrich Schnauss
Underrated silence

BORN

Le fou
Electrocardiodrama

NO RES

Lleida
Animac 2012

ANTONI TÀPIES

2012-02-20T14:23:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

Life

“Art is life” Antoni Tàpies once said in his reflection on the fact of artistic expression. Psychologist Ramon Bayés wrote that a person is his biography: the person begins at birth and ends in death, therefore, until we die our person is not finished and only once dead, when all our life is drawn, we have the whole person, not before. The painter Antoni Tapies died at age 88 on 6 February in Barcelona, the city where he was born and lived most of his life. His biography is already drawn, it has come to its end, so now it is the time to enjoy his work understanding the person who created it. As Ramon Bayés once wrote, the important time is the emotional time, the time that makes us feel happy or suffer, and it has no measure. In the work of Antoni Tapies we have a tragic sense of life, full of symbols that carry the least to the category of all. His time is now part of ours.

Antoni Tapies i Puig was born in Barcelona on December 23, 1923 at Canuda Street. His childhood was marked by a family atmosphere between the anticlerical and liberal rationalist father and the Catholicism of his mother. The Spanish Civil War brought to him the horror of the wounded in the bombings and the fear reflected on his mother’s face. In 1940 he suffered an accident that caused him a heart attack. He later suffered tuberculosis and was admitted to the Puig d'Olena sanatorium where he met the poet Carles Riba while he was visiting Catalonia clandestinely. His long stay in the hospital resulted in readings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and especially The Book of Tea Kakuzo getting into the Zen philosophy.

After his sanatorium stage he began law studies but finally he abandoned them for painting in 1946. Then he had already discovered the Catalan avant-garde magazine D'Ací d'Allà, and flipped in the collage, the abstract art and the mixture of materials. In 1948 form with the poet Joan Brossa and the painters Joan Ponç, Modest Cuixart and Joan Josep Tharrats the Dau al set movement with a strong link with surrealist ideas in its early days giving the fruit of a magazine with the same title. But Antoni Tàpies soon broke away from the movement and went his own way, having a huge international impact throughout the fifties coming to participate in the exhibition at MoMA of New York dedicated to the new Spanish art in 1960. From there, Antoni Tàpies has been considered one of the most important artists of abstract art, along with Willem de Kooning and Pollock among others. Much of his work is divided between the most important contemporary art museums in the world, as the MoMA or the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Professor Diego Gracia says in his book Como arqueros al blanco that what drives every person is to achieve happiness and that we should not settle for less. Antoni Tàpies' response to what is probably the only question of existence, that is, how to get this happiness is the equalization of the minimum to the maximum. Everything is in everything, exactly the same way everything is in Tàpies, also with an undeniable tragic sense of life. Because there is no white light in Tàpies’ work but it has the darkness and the everyday life that contains all the light they absorb. In his dark tones we find all the light, also in his humble materials and its string and oxides, we find life, the effort to find this happiness and the wounded by the failed because of searching it in the wrong places. His symbols are minimal, the cross, the hands and nearby objects, chairs, socks, wrought iron. Happiness is near, and life is in us and in every aspect that surrounds us.

Catalan society has often been hard on his work. When he was commissioned a sculpture for the MNAC in Barcelona, Tàpies created El mitjó (The sock) of 18 meters, being rejected by most of society as a result of misunderstanding. Again an everyday object elevated to a higher category, something rejected by a society that is used to extol only simple grandeurs which are completely alien to them if not simply inexistent. Finally, the sculpture was reduced in dimensions to chair the Fundació Antoni Tàpies of which the artist was so proud. The country has not lived up to his talent, an art of thought-provoking suggestions and travelling the hieroglyph of life, suffering from uncertainty and searching for what lies beyond. The art of Tàpies is the cross of time’s face.

ANTONI TÀPIES. RETROSPECTIVE click here

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

2012-02-19T00:00:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

The fog between the numbers

Sometimes one comes too late. Vital landscapes succeed and many escape us. The ones hold in time become experiences that accumulate one after another like footprints of different depth and shape. Some represent potholes difficult to get out from, others are just worlds that we once cherished and now we regret not having lived intensely. Finally, those still with us, only glimpsed in moments of apparent lucidity. The fog between the numbers that frame us, the space that runs between everything rigid, the air we lack, as any of the verses Wislawa Szymborska once wrote.

Poet, essayist and translator, Wislawa Szymborska was born in Prowent, Bnin, now part of Kórnik, Poland, in 1923. Soon her family moved to Krakow where she lived until her death just some days ago at age 88. Despite the difficult circumstances she lived, as the invasion of Poland by Hitler's Germany when she was 16, or the communist dictatorship after World War II, she always enjoyed a great sense of humor and reminded us of our duty to feel fortunate to live in this world, as she wrote "" a modest corner, / in which the stars says good-night / and to which they blink / with no meaning". A modest corner she rediscovered in every of her eyes’ blink, as she was anxiously waiting for a fog above all to let her curiosity fly away once and again.

Her writings were the lucid fog that allowed us to build our new breath in front of mystery. It reflects the modesty of one who feels as holder of a treasure more valuable than our ability to appreciate it. A dozen books of poetry is his whole literary career of which she rejected the pre-1957 as too close to the socialist regime. Her life went by in her apartment always surrounded by chocolates and brandy, always close at hand, with her friends and asserting her idea "Only a little naive questions are truly profound."

The Nobel Prize came to her in 1996 and she sentenced in her accepting speech that "the poet of today is skeptical and even suspicious". Irony continually sticks out from her words, spoken or written. The three hundred pages that store all her writing are full of humor, mystery and doubt, always denying the great words and understanding that the contradiction is part of the game of life. Her poetry is now part of my landscape, despite the numbers.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

THEO ANGELOPOULOS

2012-02-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

A time with no dimensions

The Basquesculptor Eduardo Chillida compared the instant with thegeometric point. The idea is that a point in space has nodimensions, so you cannot measure it, not because it has neither wide norlong, nor thickness or volume. The same goes for an instant. Howlong is an instant?. Space and time are two of the dimensions weperceive through our vital consciousness, however, we cannot measuretheir minimum two expressions: the point and the instant. Thiscontradiction, Chillida said, is linked to the concept of eternity,since neither has it any dimension, so instant and eternity conceptscould be perfectly matched. An instant is eternal as apoint is unlimited.

My firstexperience with the films of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos was with Eternity and a day (Mia mia kai mere aiwniothta, 1998) and his recent death in tragic circumstances brought me back tothat starting point, always eternal. Thódoros Angelópoulos was born in Athensin 1935 and became a landmark of European cinema of the last fifty years,especially from the seventies with the film TheTravelling Players (O Thiassos,1975). His work made the slow filming, often devoid of sound, a visual poetryexercise, but also movies of social and political criticism. Titles such as Landscape in the mist (Topio stin Omichli, 1988) or Ulysses' Gaze (To Vlemma tou Odyssea, 1995) are clear examples of the two aspectsof his creativity, the first political and the second metaphorical andsymbolic. He achieved the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1998 with themovie with which I discovered him and now he was working on the third film of atrilogy about Greek history. The othersea was thought to discuss the economic crisis in Greece but a policemanended his life at age 76 when his motorcycle knocked him down while he wascrossing a street in the neighborhood of Kératsini in Athens.

He was also a victimof the military coup in Greece in 1967 when they closed the newspaper where heworked as a film critic after abandoning his legal career and getting a degreein literature in Paris. He worked as a journalist until the military preventedhim from doing so. Then he turned to film and carved out a very personal careerthat appears as a dimensionless point in film history, an everlasting and unhurriedpoint, a critical and poetic call to wake us from the resignation.

EXHIBITION THE DUST OF TIME click here

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

BÉLA TARR

2012-02-17T15:29:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

From crying to discouragement

He says he retires from cinema andthat will leave us a huge void. Béla Tarr is one of thegreatest minds of European cinema and at a time when the death of Theo Angelopoulos hasleft us orphans of poetry and social criticism, the announced withdrawalof Tarr this orphanhood enlarges.

His latest film is The Turin Horse, winner ofthe Silver Bear-Grand Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at Berlinale 2011. Astory based on a real experience of the philosopher FriedrichNietzsche, or so it’s said, on January 3, 1889, when he saw the driverof a cart maltreating his horse in the street because it, exhausted,refused to move. As the story goes, Nietzsche could not help cryingand hugging the animal so the shock was such that helost his speech and consciousness until his death ten yearslater.

Tarr wonders about the otherpart of the story, the one of the horse and the cart driver. Tarr focuseson the narrative of the life of that man, surrounded by misery withher daughter and the horse on a farm in the middle of a bleak andstormy landscape, isolated, and almost at the gates of apocalypse.

The direction of Béla Tarr isbased on a script written between himself and László Krasznahorkai, andit has the powerful cinematography work of Fred Kelemen, the best translation inimages of Tarr’s film language as in the previous collaborationsJourney to the Plain, 1995 ,andThe Man from London, 2007. Filmdirector and writer, his work is delicate and powerful at atime, being able of interpreting the path of Béla Tarr becominghis wonderful dance partner. The same goes for the music by Mihály Vig, also aregular contributor to Tarr’s films like Damnation, Satantango, in which he also performed the mainrole, Werckmeister Harmonies andThe Man from London.

This is a new artistic triumph forthe Hungarian director, loneliness, domestic violence as theresult of helplessness and the misery of the environment, acting as hopeless communicatingvessels that shown starkly, returned us all the ghostswe hide in our mind. If it is truly the last, thanksfor all you have given us, master.

BÉLA TARR. RETROSPECTIVE click here
VIDEO BÉLA TARR. L'ALCHIMISTE click here

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

GLENN CLOSE

2012-02-16T15:34:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

Faithfull to herself

American actress Glenn Close introduces her latest film Albert Nobbs (2010), directed by Rodrigo García, as a very personal project. This is a movie based on the story The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs written by Irish novelist and poet George Moore and set in Dublin in the second half of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of a woman who poses as a man to survive, a role that Glenn Close had already played at Off Broadway in 1982. Almost thirty years later and coinciding with her great success on television playing the powerful lawyer Patty Hewes in the Damages series, Glenn Close has made every effort in taking forward this project completely produced outside the Hollywood majors and serving as producer and co-writer, in addition to count for a third time with director Rodrigo García after the previous Things you can tell just by looking at her (2000) and Nine Lives (2005).

When shepresented the film at the last San Sebastian Film Festival/ DonostiaZinemaldia, where he was awarded the Donostia Prize for her career, she said,"I showed this story to many friends. Some were busy, others didn’t findthe way of doing it. When I shot MeetingVenus, with István Szabó, he said he understood it because he had lived invarious regimes and he felt able to understand what it was like to change theface depending on who was ahead. He took the story to politics and did a scripttreatment. But we failed to remove it, later I met Rodrigo, and I wanted totake this to a more personal land. István is still in the credits because hedid a great job".

The performanceof Glenn Close earned her nominations for Golden Globe Awards and Oscar AcademyAwards and is well above the final result of the film. She returns to show offher acting skills in the role of woman who hides her femininity to get aheadliving as a man working as a waiter in a hotel in Victorian Dublin.

But analysis ofher talent must go further, we are talking about a woman who has played some ofthe best female roles that are recalled in the last three decades and, perhaps,never had the recognition, especially in the artistic aspect, it deserves.Unforgettable in the role of the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by Stephen Frears, or as AlexForrest harassing Michael Douglas in FatalAttraction (1987) by Adrian Lyne. And what would the series Damages be without the richness providedby Glenn Close as the fighting Patty Hewes?. She is certainly responsible thattelevision roles have achieved the same level of the film ones, something thatmany never considered a few years ago. Glenn Close came, saw and conqueredartistically once again.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Photos courtesy of Festival de Cine de San Sebastián / Donostia Zinemaldia

ŠEJLA KAMERIĆ & ANRI SALA

2012-02-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

Double-deal

Šejla Kamerić i Anri Sala

1395 Days Without Red

Production stills from 1395 Days without Red, photo by Milomir Kovačevic Strašni
A project by Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers'

2011

Imagine two people looking at the same mountain from two opposite points. Each one sees a different side of the mountain but the mountain. Each one could say that what they see is the mountain, but so is the side that they cannot see. That’s also something applicable to life itself and that can help us have a more open attitude to existence and all its manifestations.

Šejla Kameric and Anri Sala have created a project with two visions in collaboration with Ari Benjamin Meyers in which the difference in points of view leads us to a broader understanding of the same event. The 1394 days without red project refers to the days of the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996, where the continued shootings between snipers became embedded in everyday life making any action that involved go out home a genuine act of survival. Šejla Kameric and Anri Sala made a film work together that resulted in two independent films, making it clear that the vision of each person, although the starting material is the same, has a decisive influence on any aspect of life, and also in the art world.

The artist from Sarajevo Šejla Kamerić presents her film following the character played by Spanish actress Maribel Verdú. The anguish of having to decide at every moment which way to go knowing the risk of being shot, such as street or intersection, alone or mixed with the crowd, while the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra, which never ceased its activity, rehearse the play The Pathetique by Tchaikovsky, as it’s known his Symphony No. 6. Trials with its stops and returns to start on the same passage, are mixed with the anguish of the woman in the street not knowing what to do. It’s a work which refers to its author to her own frightening experience.

The film of the Albanian artist Anri Sala bears on the fact that the character of Maribel Verdú is also a member of the orchestra and goes to the rehearsal session. Problems with the tempo interrupt the rehearsal again and again as the musician stops at every intersection and value load holding her breath to go on and mentally rehearsing the piece at the same time, humming it. In the film the rehearsal of the orchestra and the instrumentalist evolution converge in their own performances of the piece. From the orchestra’ rehearsal to the woman’s mind.

The entire project is a necessary bioscopic experience, openness and hygienic, to which the viewer must assert his own vision as one more and unique at the same time in the puzzle of existence.

EXHIBITION click here

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Stills from films 1395 days without red by Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala

THE GOON SHOW

2012-02-12T13:46:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

Could we take a taxi for breakfast?

The answer isyes, of course, but rare because excess heat can cause some unfortunate sideeffects. I could go about choosing dishes tmore or less respectful with theenvironment without that article ceased to have meaning, because it is aboutThe Goon Show, the British sitcom that broke the rule of sense to the delightof listeners of the BBC during the fifties.

The Goon Show camefrom Spike Milligan who was the creator and head writer throughout theircareer. Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe met whileserving in the Royal Artillery during World War II. Secombe described theirmeeting as if a first script for The Goon Show it were: "Suddenly therewas a terrible noise as some monstrous object fell from the sky quite close tous. There was considerable confusion, and in the middle of it all the flap ofthe truck was pushed open and a young, helmeted idiot asked 'Anybody see a gun?'It was Milligan." Secombe's answer to that question was "What colourwas it?". Later Milligan met Peter Sellers at the Hackney Empire whereSecombe was performing. By then, the late forties, the young Peter Sellers hadalready debuted on the BBC in the program Ray'sa laugh with comedian Ted Ray. At that first meeting, they wrote a firstscript called Crazy People which laterwould become the germ of The Goon Showwith Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and, in the early chapters,Michael Bentine.

They were so enthusiastic thatthey found the doors of a BBC open despite the company wasn’ttoo much convinced. Still, the group had its premiere as Crazy People in May 1951. Then theprograms consisted of four or five gags and musicalinterludes with a cast that included PeterSellers, Harry Secombe,Spike Milligan, MichaelBentine, The Ray Ellington Quartet, TheStargazers andMax Geldray. The audience increased so quickly during thefirst season that the BBC gave them a second one already underthe name The Goon Show. During this period MichaelBentine leftthe group to pursue a solo career, but his creative tensions to Milliganare known. Still, the group's success only increased up to a dozen seasons endingin 1960, including five films: Penny Points to Paradise (Tony Young,1951),Let's go crazy (Allan Cullimore, 1951),Down among the Z men (Maclean Rogers,1952), The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn (JosephSterling,1956) and the Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film (Richard Lester,1960), as well as some special programs in the still young Britishtelevision. Once separated, they gathered for two uniqueprograms on television, first in 1968 under the title Tales of Men's Shirts and alast known as The Last Goon Showof All, both also written by Spike Milligan.

Their separation due to personnel problemsprevented the creativity of the group, abandoning theiractivity when their success didn’t stop to increase. Remembering theirsolo careers after the break up, Peter Sellers is certainly the mostfamous, but that's another story. He died in 1980 at 54 years victim of the heart problems he suffered all his life. Michael Bentine died in1996, Harry Secombe in 2001 and Spike Milligan 2002. Artists like TheBeatles and Monty Python have admit their influence. Many programs havebeen lostf forever but the taxi they once asked forbreakfast is yet to come.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

JILLIAN EDELSTEIN

2012-02-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

Looking for a meaning

Photographer Jillian Edelstein comesfrom the primary colours light of South Africa. She chose to look for themeaning of existence taking pictures of everything that gives her the germen ofa new question. Politics, artists, landscapes, ancestral traditions,photography, cinema...Jillian Edelstein’s work has been published in some ofthe most important magazines of the world but still there are a lot ofquestions to answer, a lot of things to portrait. Now, we are going to answerwho is Jillian Edelstein.

Why did you choose the light as a way ofexpression?

I grew up in a colourful society and mymother, in particular, always made me look at it - all of it- in a verydefinite heightened way - she almost taught me to look - then I began or neededto interpret what I was seeing - marrying the visual , the creative with thepolitical and make sense of that.

You were born in South Africa. Has thelight something special there?

Yes it does ....it's bright, primarycolours unlike here in the UK where they feel more muted and like pastels -there it's intense and vivid and unforgiving.....powerful.

In light, do you prefer intensity or asubtle one?

Subtle is my preference but one has toknow how to adapt in either circumstances if we talk literally...

Your earlier days were as a pressphotographer. What did you learn then?

That I was as good as the last image itook. That being in the moment and getting it and drawing from it and thecircumstances were important - it's where i realised how important focus wasand how , still, I go into some kind of tunnel vision when I'm concentratingand 'on the job'. It also taught me about connecting and how connecting withwho you working with and what you put out is as good as performance.

One of your photo series is called “Truht& lies”. Do you think there’s more truth or more lie in the press world?

Tough question - here today we'rewatching the story about the News of the World and phone hacking and I thinkabout Iraq today and the US troops going home and China and a village where a terriblestory is unfolding and I think that sadly there are more lies but that if westop telling the stories we'll have no truth and that would be bad.

That series is a black and white one, apowerful image to represente the reality in your own country. Actually, whichones are the lies in South Africa?

I think SA is a feel good story now but.......watching it closely it's a worry because power does corrupt andcorruption is an evil that knows no bounds and if I went again and I told thatstory over again I’d still choose B&W because it did make it more powerful. I recall seeing Claude Lanzman's Shoahand i always pictured the Holocaust in B&W and then I got a shock when isaw that of course it all happened in bright vivid day by day colour - howweird how weird but the world is weird oftentimes.

I know that in SA certain people tookthe rap for the 'powers that be' who took the amnesty cue and ran for theirlives !

In the other hand, your series"Sangoma", is in a deeply intense colour. It's about beliefs inancestral spirits and other traditions. What were you looking for in thatproject?

I was looking for meaning - when Istarted it I was cynical and sceptical - later I stopped being judgemental. Isaw how proud, and meaningful theirculture is and I felt that in that simplicity there is so much power andmeaning - I found it most humbling.

I miss them in those mountains and inthat landscape.

You moved to London and after yourstudies your portraits were published in very important publications: The NewYorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview and veryimportant campaigns. When you look at your career, do you think it’s been ahard one?

I don’t think it's ever easy - it alwaysfeels like one is having to challenge oneself and push boundaries. And thatnever stops.

What about your experience with sopopular and very important people like Woody Allen, Nelson Mandela or JimJarmusch?

When I see the question it brings asmile to my face ....because the experiences are so intense and vivid in mymind. Each with a little story, a little gem in the memory box - all such extraordinary people and the meeting ...well....that's the gift.

And which ones are your"Affinities"?

Ok....difficult question - probably ...the amazing editor Liz jobey. Then my former agent and the man who encouragedme to get into film, Simon Crocker - and the actress Jane Horrocks - these areall people who I met through work and then they became great friends as well ascolleagues....

Are you working on a film?

Yes ... but early days. I just finisheda 'teaser' - we shot in Mallorca and here in London tho ' it's a NY story... So now we got out to get production guysinterested as well as talent !

Good!

Yes it feels good.

And, do you think photography, and artin general, also films of course, should be useful forsociety or just entertainment?

I think there 's place for both aspectsof which you allude to , for sure.

Could you imagine the photo of yourdreams?

Maybe it would be a dream within a dream- it would be space, and fields and movement and then it would pan to dazzlingsunlight on sea water ...and it would pan back to the sound of screechingdelighted gulls and then a women with a porcupine headdress would emerge abovea cliff and she would be symbolic of hope and dreams and power and love andshe'd smile.

JILLIAN EDELSTEIN. A RETROSPECTIVE click here

Interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by Jillian Edelstein. All rights reserved
Jillian Edelstein website http://www.jillianedelstein.co.uk/

JENNIFER HALL

2012-02-07T13:10:00.000-08:00

CATALÀ | ESPAÑOL

Because the world is blue

Jennifer Hall presents her debut album In this (2011). “I just have strings, a few other things. My thoughts and ways, hopefuleyes and face. They call me naive, saying not to believe” as she sings in the song Green and blue. Obviously, she has more than the strings of herguitar, she has a sensitivity that goes far beyond her beloved green and bluecolours. She has a deep blue ocean inside, the music of a woman than writes herinner views. “The world will still begreen and blue after I sing a song for you but hope the colors seem asbeautiful as you are to me”. But our world won’t be the same afterlistening to her songs.

Why are you “In this”?

Oh, it means “submersed in somethingpresent in a moment or time” so it seemed appropriate for this album.

Why was it so appropriate for thisalbum?

The tunes are written from a verysubjective view, no distance from the topics at hand, straight from the timeand place of each song.

What does the passage of time mean toyou?

As time passes it seems you can lookback at things and see them much differently than how you viewed them beforewhile in the midst of it.

Looking to some of your musicinfluences: Patsy Cline, Rufus Wainwright, Jeff Buckley, Wilco... can we hearall those influences on your debut album?

I don’t really know. I can’t listen withan objective ear. I’ve had people say they can spot some resemblances to Jeffin the voice, some of Rufus in the melodies. They are far too kind.

The most of them are male singers.

True. I also really love Bonnie Riatt,Norah Jones... I’ve heard both of those too.7

And in music, what do you look for?

Honesty, sincerity. Something thatcatches me or moves me in one way or another. A great beat, wonderful lyrics,etc.

Do you really see the world in green andblue, as the title of one of your songs?

I suppose so, they are my favouritecolors!

What do those colors make you think of?

Peace, calm, stillness.

"I just have strings, a few otherthings. My thoughts and ways, hopeful eyes and face. They call me naive...” isthe opening verse of “Green and blue”. Happiness is in the little things?

For sure.

And what kind of strings do you have inyour life?

They referenced music strings, guitarstrings, but I have all shorts though!

For example?

I come with experiences and insecuritiesjust as anyone does. I’m making peace with them though. It’sbeen a great time of change for me, this being a big one, making peace with thethings that have happened, the events that make you who you are.

And who are you?

I’d say complex but I’m sure I’m not asexcited as all that. Thoughtful, gentled spirited, passionate, a performer atheart.

We can hear that heart in the hardersound that surrounds the after break up hymn “When we were good” and the lastverse says “Glad to be alone at last”. Is it an honest gladness?

Honest in ridding of “him”, a falsesense of security in being alone perhaps a bit tongue and cheek.

“I keep packing up my things but yourmemory I still bring...Please leave”. In your words love looks more like a drugaddiction. Do you think we are made for loving?

I think we’re made to love, yes,absolutely, the ways in which love is depicted in idea, the ways we would liketo believe it lives. Maybe love is painful, fleeting but it’s beautiful andvery real and necessary.

“I cannot guarantee to do no harm. Weare not always as strong as we think we are.”.So do you really think life ispain?

I think life is inherently painful butsurely not just painful, it’s a beautiful wonderful thing but pain isinevitable. We are wired in such a way that we feel and absorb and understandso much of the hardships and unfair things around us and it can be hard to seeall of that. That is definitely a personal reflection.

Which ones are your personal “Oceans”?

It’s sort of about losing longing forsomeone. My relationship with my mother, the experiences I had with her.

Do you have a spiritual vision of life?

Yes, it’s ever changing though so I dooften envision things but they evolve, change shift, etc.

What about the composing and recording processof your album?

It was recorded in Chicago, B Side Audiowith Neal Ostrovsky. He was wonderful. I wrote the tunes for the most part withNoam Wallenberg, a friend and guitarist of band.

Were you looking for a concept for the album?

Not really when I was writing. I don’treally write with a vision.

Are you spontaneous in your writings?

I’d say so. It’s all from the samesource so they must relate in some way.

If I asked you for a song to be writtenright now, what would you write?

I think it would be about where my headis these days, about change and self discovering, etc.

What would you love to discover?

My truth, to get reacquainted with myself, trueself... The world around me, is this too out there for you? I think I may thinktoo much.

Interview by Juan Carlos Romero

ANTONI TÀPIES

2012-02-06T13:24:00.000-08:00

Retrospective

AT 2000 Dues piles

Antoni Tàpies

Dues piles de terra, 2000

Procediment mixt sobre fusta

200 x 200 cm