"[…] through space, the universe comprehends me and absorbs me like a point; through thought, I comprehend it."
Pascal
"No-one in this world enjoys more consolations than those that help me to carry the Cross, for all my sweetnesses melt in abundance over the soul that drinks to the dregs the chalice of my bitternesses. Although the skin is very bitter, the fruit is exquisitely soft and sweet; and all suffering seems small when you have before your eyes the reward to which it leads.”
Brother Enrique Susón
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I.
A little more than two months ago, and in this same space that is now occupied by Estivill, during the press conference, a journalist asked the Belgian artist Jan Fabre what relationship there was between his work as a dramatist and scenographer and his sculptural production; Fabre, puzzled, replied laconically that he was one and the same author of all of his works. The people attending the presentation smiled and the phrase became a mere anecdote. But little or no attention was paid to certain serious implications which the amenable setting of the statement perhaps helped to camouflage. In the first place, Fabre spoke about authorship. That is to say, not only did he disassociate himself from that strange contemporary fashion that consists in thinking that the author has disappeared or has dissolved himself in a kind of global meta-narration that nobody can really grasp, but he expressly included himself in an artistic tradition that goes back at least to the 15th century of Van Eyck. Fabre is an author, in the same way that Estivill is. The second important implication is that this author knows he is immersed in a global project marked by a characteristic sign that lights up, so to speak, episodically. The idea is simple but not for that reason any less transcendental. Bergson’s concept of duration can illuminate our way here: not only does man perceive himself as duration — durée réelle, the fundamental idea that he develops in his Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness and in Matter and Memory — but also the whole of reality is duration and élan vital, the idea he develops in Creative Evolution. For Bergson, a philosopher is someone who — and the concept is equally valid for an artist or for any author — has “only” had one great idea that he has progressively developed in his work. As we can see, Fabre’s anecdote was not at all superficial.
Determining what was the “great idea” of Plato, Kant, Picasso, Tàpies, Foix, Bergson himself or any other creator means making a dialogue possible. Aesthetic reception, and intellectual debate in general, is based on this. The problematical — and fascinating — point is that in most cases this "great idea" cannot be expressed all at once, transparent, perfect and intelligible, but has to be whittled down little by little. It is the episodic illumination we have just spoken about. If we related Fabre with Van Eyck — the analogies between the two are rich and surprising — we can associate Estivill with, for example, Caravaggio. The “great idea” of the Italian artist was the radical anthropologisation of the sacred. And we say "anthropologisation" and not "paganisation" because the aspiration is not to destroy spirituality but to give it a human touch. The painting The Death of the Virgin has often been cited as an example: it is speculated that the model must have been a drowned prostitute. The inclusion — at the patron’s behest — of Mary Magdalene beside the dead woman in this picture intended for an institution devoted to recovering women of easy virtue, related to the church of Santa Maria della Scala, would indeed make this possibility plausible. Dressed in red, and not in blue as dictated by the Marian iconographic tradition, she brings the sacred closer to the human dimension, makes it comprehensible, assimilable. It is also with the goal of understanding and believing that St Thomas inserts his fingers into Christ’s mortal wound. The gesture of passing through the skin of the son of God contains, in essence, Caravaggio’s “great idea”: like the photographic punctum that Roland Barthes spoke of in his Camera lucida, all of the energy of the composition, all of its potentiality, emanates from that minimum bond; man comes into contact with man through a form of penetration that is literal, explicit, but not therefore lacking in symbolism. This was done not only by Caravaggio but also, and closer to ourselves, by José de Ribera. His bow-legged men, bearded women and apostles have in common a humanity that Ribera always expressed through a rigorous analysis of the corporeality of the characters. The Xàtiva artist is a painter of skins. Or Brother Enrique Susón imagined by Zurbarán: a medieval mystic tattooing on his skin a large letter "H," which for us means “hombre: man.”
In any case, the exercise is not exclusive to Baroque painting (and now we can openly state that Estivill is an artist who is profoundly related to the Baroque). Very recently, the Seville Fine Arts Museum held an untypical exhibition of photographs by the artist Pierre Gonnord. While most present-day portrait photographers opt for static (and all too often hieratic) frontality, consolidated as a strategy of representation by such pre-eminent figures as Richard Avedon, Rineke Dijkstra or Diane Arbus, Gonnord recovers the lessons of Baroque art: he portrays people about whom we know nothing but their name and who, moreover, belong to the lowest social classes. Like Ribera’s Archimedes, they are men who have been worn down by the passing of time, people who accumulate the cruel scars that reality has mercilessly scored in their skin (Angelopoulos’ Ulysses knows that at the end he will only be recognised by the scars that the voyage has imprinted on his body, aged and worn by the travails of life). But that is not all: Maria del Corral, the curator of the Seville exhibition, decided that Gonnord’s pictures should be hung as a part of the Museum’s permanent collection. Authors, particularly from the 16th and 17th centuries like Zurbarán, Valdés Leal, Mattia Preti, Murillo or Alonso Cano — what a collection that is! — could in this way be rediscovered in the light of certain human realities that, in theory, are situated light years away from the majestic dignity of those Virgins, Kings and Saints. Someone wrote that what this exercise achieved was not to sanctify those anonymous Jules, Pauls, Johns or Ajmils but to humanise figures like Susón, the St Jeromes and the immaculate virgins: in fact, what it achieved was to illustrate the anthropologisation that we spoke of in reference to Caravaggio.
II.
Estivill’s vision is split into two complementary formats that speak of the skin in the literal and metaphorical senses, that illustrate an ascent and a descent from the strictest corporeality to the pure immateriality of the symbol. In this journey, which is deeply rooted in our iconographic tradition, the word plays a decisive role — and the fact that a poet participates in the project is no mere coincidence. Estivill dismembers the poem (ASCENDE/RINOVARMI) in search of what Scholem calls the absolute word, that is, one that does not yet have meaning but is "pregnant with signification." "A word that is not a concept,” as María Zambrano put it, “because it is this word itself that gives rise to conception"; "A word without a language,” writes the poet José Ángel Valente, “with no weight of communication or notification, a unique natural space of all things poetic, what in Bloch’s radically secular, not theological, thinking would correspond to pre-appearance (VorSchein) and in which the prefigurative or prophetic value of the work of art would be sustained, where what does not yet exist manifests itself or appears before its own signification."
What is dramatic here, as Valente himself has pointed out, is that the history of western thought can be read, to a large extent, as the history of the disincarnation of the logos. “In the beginning,” says the author of The Abyssal Experience, “the word logos, in the 1970s version, was the translation of the Hebrew term dabar, which designates at the same time the word and the thing. To the disincarnation of the logos correspond the corruption of language, the inadequacy of names and the exile of the word. The knowledge of Los claros del bosque [referring to Zambrano’s well-known work The Clearings in the Forest] would once again become a knowledge of the word as a place of reconciliation; a place of the absolute latency of being, a poetic place. Because poetry itself was only given to us, as Brother Luis de León said in a famous text, in order for words and things to conform”; and it is this conformity that stands behind Estivill’s experience: starting out from the concept of Ego-skin drawn by authors like Didier Anzieu, the artist explores the function of this cutaneous space as a relational frontier, as a protective amniotic wrapping, as a logos, a primordial word that keeps meaning intact. It was Anzieu himself who spoke of the myth of Marsyas to illustrate this concept: after beating the satyr in an impossible musical competition, Apollo flayed him alive and hung his skin from a branch of a tree. With this gesture, according to Anzieu, what the god does is to deprive the defeated one of all manner of identity, to literally strip him of his Ego-skin. However, and despite Marsyas’ death, his skin continues to be a source of wealth and abundance, to the point that it gives birth to the river named after the satyr. Other cases of profanation of the cutaneous surface in our tradition (it is important that Marsyas’ skin remains intact, separated from the body but not perforated or profaned) are those of St Sebastian and Christ: in this case the skin loses its function of a container of vital fluids, of keeping the body alive. In both cases, despite the material death of the bodies, the union with the skin (reincarnation) is indissoluble. Marsyas cannot live again because his skin no longer belongs to him — but Christ can.
What we are faced with is a complex exploration of individual and collective identity which the artist traces from our natural relationship with words and the materiality of the world, of the necessary relationship between thought and the place we occupy in space as physical realities (Pascal). In Estivill’s creative adventure, the process of disincarnation denounced by Valente is solved insofar as the symbol is indissolubly linked to the real presence of the thing, to the extent that spirituality is expressed in matter. In fact, according to Valente, the informalism of Tàpies is based precisely on this: “That matter which, before manifesting itself, has been interiorised, has been unified and perceived in its spontaneous movement, would come very close to what Novalis calls in his Hymn I“the innermost soul of life” (Lebens innerste Seele). […] The accomplishment of the work is as much an interior process as the visible exercise of an art form. Because the movement towards the core of matter is also a movement directed to the heart of innerness.” Interior or exterior, but in any case, the skin as a bond between these two complementary realities.
I am skin, Estivill tells us: and we must not forget that we, too, can be the skin of others, and those others can, at the same time, be our own skin.