Fernando Pessoa
In 1991 I exchanged my small home village in Twente for Amsterdam. From this moment on the magnitude of things was solely defined by my hunger for the arts instead of by dogmas of religious zealots. I proved insatiable for all new perspectives the world of art created!
Yet, although I loved every angle of it, I also remained aloof. As if I couldn't climb my own threshold. My niece, just graduated from Willem de Kooning in Rotterdam and sharing a similar religious background, gave me Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet' (Boek der Rusteloosheid).
Pessoa turned out to be a stepping stone. His words gave me a map and a compass and showed the connection between what I saw and how I thought about it. Up to this day, his book functions as a travel companion. Not one week passes without me leafing through it and loosing myself in one of his many poems.
Fernando Pessoa is a poet able of grasping the impotence in man's existence and the impossibility of making sense of it in a single sentence, but at the same time he does this with a tremendous zest for life and a fearlessness that, to me, is precisely spot on. How to be human is the question and the quest that, unconsciously at one time, yet way more consciously nowadays, forms the basis of my work.
"All I am is nothing more than a ravine
In which a dim light
through which I know I am, without appearances,
directs me darkly.
Something in between being and non-being
and inhabited by me,
like the dust that rises in the wind
lives only when it shows it."
The Book of Disquiet
Pessoa guided me into the act of actively not knowing. In doing so he defined my necessity as a maker profoundly. My drawings start off exactly where my knowing or understanding ceases. Pessoa shows me in his many wanderings, being the keen observer and the pessimist that he was, the fabulous magic of everyday life.
"It would be more correct to say that a state of the soul is a landscape; that sentence is better in that it does not contain the lie of a theory, but only the truth of a metaphor…”
The Book of Disquiet
His choice to speak as different characters also inspired me.
Pessoa wrote many of his works as heteronyms; different characters who worked independently and used different forms and languages. Pessoa disintegrated on his paper, and his strength stemmed from this disintegration.
In this fragmentation of his identity I found the space to investigate completely different styles. Why must everything be reduced to one hand of drawing?
In the past year, a period connotating and denoting my accordance and relation to global prowess regarding Covid19, Pessoa pushed me to go and try something completely new. Since the start of the crisis, I have been drawing a small observation every day and unworrying whether it fits into the rest of my oeuvre. Every day my hand acts like a seismograph of my mood. Just like Pessoa acted after his daily wanderings through the city throughout all seasons. His writings a gauge of an inner heartbeat and necessity.
To observe and to render a picture of what this time does to me and us. Little visual notes, Consolation Pieces, which I “give back to the world on social media every day” was something he certainly helped overcome my own barriers.
Pessoa showed in prose and poetry an ontology of our fragmented existence and at the same time he knew the fragility of the individual and the impossibility to make sense of his role in that existence.
In an almost schizophrenic way, he succeeds in getting you to really crawl inside an experience through language and at the same time he allows you to look at it from a distance. Pessoa shows us metaphysics that go beyond the framework of thought and, with all heteronyms, holds up a mirror in which we see something different than our own reflection.
The unruliness and contradiction in his language and the images he evokes in the process, stirs up an enormous necessity to create for me. Again and again.
“The main thing is knowing how to see,
To know how to see without thinking,
To know how to see when you see,
And not think when you see
Or see when you think.”
Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep
Anook Cléonne, 2021
