piano playing for paintings

today at the gallery, two different pianists (a chilean jazz pianist and a young prodigious french classical pianist) happened each to stop by at different times in the day to play for a while in the gallery. i love when this happens because it enhances my mood while i'm working and when the music fills the air of the gallery, i am convinced that it nourishes the artworks (like giving water to plants) and that the artworks too are enjoying the music.  today i was certain that the figures in marcos carrasquer's works were listening with their ears along with me. some might find this notion a bit kooky, but i'm certain that the sound frequencies emitted by the piano literally touch and penetrate the surfaces of the artworks and something inevitably happens even if it is too subtle and invisible for us to detect but certain things just seem so obvious.

une sublimation d'humanisme

today a poignant comment was made by a collector who returned to see the marcos carrasquer exhibition "nobody's dead"  for the second day in a row. she said that she could sense in his work "une sublimation d'humanisme" despite the presence of sadistic scenes or horrific subject matter. she said without knowing marcos that he must deep down be a humanist at heart because she felt an ultimate hopefulness coming from his work. 

her capacity to express this type of truth is an example of what i call seeing with the heart's eye; she was clearly receiving from his paintings and drawings well beyond the visible. but it is only through the visible of course that the invisible level can be accessed which is why paintings are doorways into the unknown. it isn't a matter of understanding intellectually with the frontal brain, it is an intuitive comprehension that the heart's antennae pick up.

if only i could figure out a way to show people how to open their heart's eye....wide open so that they can absorb in through their pores all this lovely life force.

de vita et moribus epicuri

last valentine's day, the gallery invited the jocelyne danchick dance company to perform "le monde entre parentheses" surrounded by the remarkable paintings of marcos carrasquer. everyone assumed that the choreographer and the painter had collaborated; it seemed the dancers had stepped out of the paintings.

given that neither marcos nor jocelyne knew of eachother's work prior to the performance, i would say it was a  'cosmic collaboration'  in an alternative space-time.  i simply want to share with you some of the photos that danielle voirin took of the performance.

on line at last!

for the past year, the gallery's website has been a true laboratory of suppositions, though mostly taking place behind the screen where the public eye had no access. 

following the gallery's big move in the fall of 2007, it was clear that the website needed to move on and grow as well. and now, a year and a half after opening the big space, the new website is finally open to the public. let's hope you enjoy it. one of the things i most wanted to include in the new version was this blog so that i might be able to share in an ongoing way, the valuable and meaningful things that take place in the gallery's daily life. my wish is to create the habit of constant and consistent blogging, so that these words become a living testimony to art's startling magic.