The secret of art

In his gipsy romance about the unfaithful wife, García Lorca versed:
“Neither nards nor conches
have such a tender skin
not even cristals in the moonlight
shine with such a brightness“

The poetry of the sea inspired André Liebscher to a whole series of works under the title of ”Mediterráneo”. The sea bottom with all his forms, snails and conches, the sand and the form of the stones are the models for his meditative images and colour tones. The emerging compositions, though, claim a lot more than imaging an original reality. Do his pictures not seem to be easily categorized among those things we call beautiful; those which are beautiful according to a classical aesthetics, because they express at once truth, goodness (which means, formal and moral adequateness) and beauty, and whose sum or totality defines perfection?
Just like the spirals or conches, whom Liebscher dedicates his attention to, the artist produces in his paintings new forms of visualisation, which transform and transmute the already existing content, making it an object of new forms of perception.

Pedro Salinas renders homage to this – useless? – beauty of the conch:
”But its futile beauty
will never be used.
They take it, contemplate it
and yet throw it away.
Naked, lone, beautiful,
… its perfection without lover
in the eternal sand.“

The artist renders homage to the beauty of the moment and reminds of the fugacity of the form whose lover he has become. An eternal secret of art?

Joan C. Roca Sans