Uncertain epilogue. Behind the book, another book. Tono Areán

Saturday, April 6, 1996:

Once a week I find them on a sloping street. I take them home and watch them live. Apparently they are flowers. Apparently. Things are never just things. These for example, some tulips, make a cheerful, fraternal note resound in the house. The books I can't resist opening are less generous. Books do not know, like tulips, how to die and be born again and finally die without further ado. What helps is the transient. What aspires to the eternal is of no consolation.
Christian Bobin. "Self-portrait with radiator."

Your appearance always applies to paper: for meditating, without traces, becomes evanescent, no matter how much instinct is exalted in some vehement and lost gesture to look for you.
Write-

Stéphane Mallarmé. "The Book."

At number 3 Benigno Soto Street in Madrid, as a strange year 2021 comes to an end, Alicia Chillida and Miguel Ángel Mendo delicately nail the images and words that the reader now holds in his hands in the form of a book on an exposed brick wall, taking advantage of the sinew and the sore of its rigging.

Is this book already present at this moment? Things are never just things. There is the book, but there is not the book. The installation shapes a space, determines and modifies it. It is an organic growth, you have to walk around to see little by little these still lifes accompanied by words. The totality is also important, it is encompassed in a single glance: the leaf is the tree. Time is space. To look is to see.

The leaves of the book in space, those of the brick wall, nailed by Alicia and Miguel Ángel, share in the same place the ikebanas of one and the haikus of the other, it is almost obligatory, the surface of "exhibition", the totality of the space, determines this decision. The leaves of this organic tree now come together in the book that the reader can take with him; it is no longer necessary to walk among the leaves, now they accompany the reader. And they do so in an individualized way, the images and the poems gain independence. The former are housed on the odd pages, those on the right, and are accompanied by the poems on their even pages, those on the left. In this way, what previously shared a single place, now offers a separate reading, but in parallel, each thing in its place, but in intimate relationship.

I hope that, like the tulips, this book knows how to die and be born again, time after time, with each reading. And may it serve as a consolation to those who make it their own.

Happy reading.

Health and happiness

T