Page 34 - Nada temas, dice ella

as the fall, weakness and failure have reappeared, and above all artists have made pathos and its forms the centre of their concerns in a leap from concepts to affections, ignoring more intellectual speculations and encouraging, as Catherine Grenier has pointed out, the ‘revenge of the emotions’ – anger, laughter, fear, pain – that had been so discredited in previous decades.6 Artists, working to the dictates of a humanistic and passionate attitude, break the dams of crit- ical distance and storm spectators in the hope of moving them and providing them with an insight into the pathetic as it appeared in old images, now through contemporary languages removed from religions, doctrines and traditional iconography, bound to no creed, with no didactic intention. An art devoid of gods, deliberately non-confessional but, above all, an art that renounces all aesthetic formalism to the benefit of emotional and existential involvement. Artists immerse themselves, body and soul, in the creative experience, which thus becomes a total experience that transforms the subject, a spiritual and of- ten ritualised exercise. This mystical, metaphysical register takes us back to the aesthetics of Plotinus but also, thanks to a literary drift, to the universe of six- teenth-century Spanish mystics quintessentially represented by the immense and complex personality of Teresa of Avila. Her vast appetite for the divine led her to develop an introspective form of writing that was neither philosophical, doctrinal nor theological but fiercely intimate, addressing spaces of vision, uto- pia and estrangement with an unprecedented emotional radicalism that proved as influential in the sphere of private behaviour as it did in that of public action. And she turned the act of writing into one of the most beautiful expressions of the ability of the human spirit to convey unusual and extreme experiences. She examines and puts herself to the test; she is transformed after being besieged by visions; she surrenders to the dictates of interior voices and speeches, and takes her experience of a burning Christianity to ecstasy.
Such an experience of limits has magnetically attracted artists from all over the world, including some of those in this show, brought together around this disobedient and visionary nun, teacher of a universal spirituality, who, we should not forget, appealed to the language of art as the most suited to describe the look of the subtle body of her apparitions: the visionary experience is an experience of the image.7 Between these two worlds – the exceptional world of the mystical and enterprising woman, prepared ‘to die a thousand deaths’, and these contemporary art forms – we sense a fusion of horizons of unsus- pected fruitfulness. Besides classical forms of representation, emancipated from traditional images and tangible objects, these new mystics update themes that have been assimilated by art for centuries, crossing ages and geographies,