Essays
These spaces are strangely silent. It is Shrove Tuesday, carnival time, a public holiday in the city. Though forcibly confined, I nevertheless see this silence as an exceptional opportunity for a clear, unimpeded view of the architecture in the background, which deceives and eludes and deceives us, as if its real lines and dimensions vanished close to and the total picture gave us the feeling of being in the presence of a monumental optical illusion. I play the game of identifying elements and combining them in an attempt to solve the riddle and discover the key to this cocktail, but I can't find it. Being perplexed is always the prelude to being dazzled, which happens here in a source of abandonment. The tiling intoxicates one's gaze and the optical effect forces one to dwell on that staircase which, like a ballroom dance step, disrupts the serenity of the supposed classicism.
There was always something disquieting about Moya's Christmas cards, as if the dream of reason inherent in that classicism had run riot and fanaticism had conjured up the hallucinatory monsters who, rather than building that utopian architecture, had to inhabit it. There was something about those drawings that recalled Piranesi turning from his placid Vedute , with the deterministic sense of their ruins, their frozen beauty, and escaping from that serenity imposed by time by embracing the prodigious imaginary world of the Carceri , so imbued with provocative modernity. In Moya, at last, man was once again the measure of all things, commanding his destiny and erecting the city in accordance with his own needs. Those greetings cards always contained a message of hope for the future founded on the realities conveyed, on the tangible heritage of every design that has been turned into architecture.
I step out into that patio-cum-square traversed by geometric barriers, and now there are three cats to provide a measure of this monumentality, which is a burst of laughter and a tribute to architecture, amid the flight of pigeons alighting on the headless statues of the chapel, bearing the message that it is impossible to introduce the city into the city par excellence. Liberated after my leap, I now stroll through the headquarters of the LABoral Art Centre, opposite a wall of Moroso boxes, and I come to understand this transformation as a highly significant local version of Wren's “Resurgam”. In 1666, old St Paul 's Cathedral in London was destroyed by fire. While cleaning up the rubble for the rebuilding, the great architect Christopher Wren found a fragment of a stone slab on which was carved the single word “Resurgam”, which means “I shall rise again”. Wren interpreted this as a good omen and placed this word, underneath a relief of the Phoenix , over the porch of the new St Paul 's Cathedral.
I shall rise again with the artists, the architecture, the landscape, the languages of my time, extending presences and fixing aspirations.
The sobbing beside us conveys bereavement, as if announcing that the ashes will lead us to another life, and down the road comes a dislocated mask, a disguise which wanted to be a geisha with a red silk kimono embroidered with chrysanthemums, as if Úrculo had run away and come to live among the fogs of the north. This is definitely another opportunity, another period.
Guache, direct, laughing, but without the extreme resonance of those exaggerated guffaws which have always been characteristic of him, has his picture in the papers because he has been signing his latest literary work at the Book Fair in Madrid, his own city, far from his native Luanco, which distantly stirs his poetic nostalgia. He is wearing a youthful T-shirt with a printed design by his faithful sidekick César Fernández Arias, the illustrator who has accompanied him on some of his adventures in the land of doggerel and drollery, the festive poetry of those performers of monologues who are now being revived in popular festivities, a pioneering version of which was produced in Avilés in the early thirties by Ana del Valle, who enclosed her Pájaro Azul (“Blue Bird”) in a cage of provocativeness and absurdity:
With a bow of cinnamon
Minerva killed an acacia!
An Apollo in his underpants
Laughs at the Three Graces
A dog with tired eyes
Bites the feet of a clock
January of rice pudding
Is playing the drum!
Faced with this sea of thick whiteness, made harsh by the emptiness of the town on this dull, grey day, I recall some of the painter-poet's poetic prose, from childhood, from a Luanco of trunks with mothballs and mahogany chests of drawers in which the maritime memory of his ancestors is preserved, complete with vases bearing drooping roses: the González Blanco family.