SENSORIUM DEI

Cecilia Caballero Contemporary Art | 2020

The obligatory quarantine keeps us in our own physical and emotional place, in a suspension that limits the body but continues to connect everything. We maintain an awareness of time and especially of space, because we cannot go through it.

Our perception becomes an absolute, a constant and immobile memory, a Sensorium Dei, Newton would say, the omnipresence and perception of emotional eternity.

There are many ways in which we try to capture the fleeting moments where the most sublime principles of contemplation lie. Today pragmatism is like a dogma. And optimism, strength and health are the axes that underpin our social behavior.

Melancholy and twilight emotions are mistaken for symptoms of weakness, helplessness, and sadness, like the ghost of a pessimistic romanticism. Something that can be "treated" like diagnosing a psychosocial problem associated with anxiety, failure, and fear. Also even worthy of being medicated, more likely to be taken as a psychological pathology than as a state of the soul.

Painting is the ideal medium to capture those fine prints. It may be less real and, due to the color temperature, become more incidental and subjective. In its lifeless and living matter, it can capture the suspension of time trapped in each brushstroke.

Searching in those mysterious states that approach us, we learn to recognize them and trust, more and more, in what we feel. Perhaps they will help us establish if we really feel the desire to return to the reality we left behind or to create a new one.

Leonel Luna | June 2020