Shrine to Time

(Image : “Traces”, a visual journal, SG, 08)

Artistically speaking, I have always been fascinated by traces, marks, blobs, stains, all the ways that the white paper loses its pristine whiteness, all the bits of paper that are on my table after I have finished a project. I never have the heart to throw them away, they are so beautiful! So I started a nice collection, which has now become another visual journal called “Traces”.

I have been wondering what all the fascination is about, and I think now that it has to do with the passing of Time on objects and on people. We live in a world that praises youth and beauty, yet this such a fragmentary view of reality. I love reading weathered faces in the same way that I love my bits of unlikely stains. Time erodes, time takes away the virginity of the white paper and of the beautiful face, and it is so much more poignant this way. Faces become interesting as Time passes, because you finally see the person, not the ideal or the possibility of the person. And the white paper becomes art.

We live in a society that for base commercial reasons detests old age (can´t fix it!) and fading beauties; it hates death with a vengeance, and that is why this society is in such a deep state of unbalance, in a pretty horrible state of denial, actually.

So I feel damn good about putting the dirty, the spoiled, the disintegrating, the broken, in their rightful places : beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the passing of Time is inevitable.