C- I will make pictures of words with diluted thoughts among the letters to be able to express some of the pleasures I’ve been given by Concha Sampol’s paintings, exhibited at Espai d’Art Miquela Nicolau in Felanitx this April 2008. Aphorisms are symptoms of mental arteriosclerosis, as the friend Vladimir Nabokov said in one of his Strong Opinions, which has always made me revolve in my mind in my pursuit of a true idea. It is because of this that in my wanderings, in my losses you will find some of the sensitive vibrations aroused by C. S.’s paintings. And it is not a trifle when a human body trembles with the visual - and tactile - energies of these works.

O- It is not true that earth is brownish or reddish or whitish or greyish; it is not true that the sky is azure, milky, blackish, dun, wine; it is not true that the sea is navyish, bluish, or the colour of seaweed, a scorpion fish or a dark night. One must let oneself be imbued with C. S.’s sensually spread colorations of the pigments to begin to appreciate that one’s eye must learn to paint the world in new ways. The space of the picture becomes a meditation zone in the sense of effort and learning towards pleasure that the 17th and 18th eastern painter poets described. The signifier without signified might be a different kind of expression to utter the perfection of volcanic seismograms, so geometrically exact as the precision of a mathematical thought, which are torn by the onslaughts of the incandescent pigments that they try to express.

N- The paintings only open the order of beauty to the gaze that can penetrate them. Scanning them for the first time one only sees an apparent outer structure that requires a slow revision, in the stillness of contemplators.The conscientious geometry that the painter has drawn can be a trap. It is. Venturing upon sailing C. S.’s canvases will require a knowledge of tact and touch and of the intelligent skill of those hands that have made so many layers of paint (there are pictures that weigh so much that they might be sculptures), and of marble dust and of latex and of carborundum and of collage and of scratches and of ips and of incisions and of loss (everything is said with the sometimes abrupt delicacy of silences). Now the cracks are opening for me to penetrate the details of the paintings towards sensory unknown experiences.

C- She frames the world, her world, because she is a seeker of order: the path of reason towards beauty. However, she is aware that only if she lets her dark side, her inner faults, her own depths, her tempests, her abysses and her wreckage free (just to give some names to the inner pathos), will she find the colours where the truths that can help us live build their nest. It is in this ambivalence that the work is done, that it presents itself in all its splendour: the grid of an apparent geometry that maps her world contains breakaway gestures (frottage, incisions, a Tàpies-like cross, a Malevitx-like square, one of Gelabert’s blue, some parallels and verticals as in Cully). And it is in this tension of opposites where her work reveals itself.

H- Nowadays, in times of worldwide crisis and cultural drought, what desperate subjects (indeed, humans have been robotized by the most sophisticated techni¬ques of capitalism, by religions and other lethal sects) look for in art and literature (just to name two all-time cultural forms) is some hope to escape from their anxi¬eties and fears. With their tools, techniques and the specific procedures of both they also expect these forms of art to tell them things that cannot be learnt in any other way. Looking at Altamira or Lascaux cave paintings and the Chinese and Sumerian texts suffices to understand it at once. C. S.’s paintings can be found in this profound research in which through some canvases and some worldly materials but mainly with lots of creative techne a primigenious soup is invented on purpose: an invented alphabet. The painter offers in her works (so diverse and different) a whole contemplation space which questions and accompanies us. As when we look at a landscape. C. S. does paint landscapes of the soul.

A- How many sensorial paths have been open after looking at C. S.’s pain¬tings? What views of horror have been closed after wandering through this garden of visions that carpet our senses with the colour of thought? Is it in the darkness of her gestures, so self-controlled and so free, or among her pure geometries where the healing of my wounds is hidden? C. S. offers us maps where to get lost, indications to impossible exits, a constellation of cracks in which one must find out the exact focus so that prodigy can spring.


Telloc, 18 March 2008