Epistolary exchanges that combine the intimacy of ties and the power of testimony

(By Emilia Racciatti). Without the internet and the arrival of social networks, the letters held conversations with those who were miles away and today, already transformed into email, they continue to be a genre that allows writing to share daily life without the urgency of an immediate response, a power which take up three recent books of the epistolary genre: “Fantasmatic of the body”, by the artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica; “Letters”, by José Ortega y Gasset and Victoria Ocampo; and “Letters to Gwen John,” by artist Celia Paul.

This temporal sequence without instant answers is also found in “Fantasmatic of the body”, edited by Caja Negra, compiled by Luciano Figueiredo and translated by Patricio Orellana, where the letters collected go from 1964 to 1974 and cover the exchanges of the Brazilians Clark ( 1920-1988) and Oiticica (1937-1980) about art as a trigger for the cultural life of the 60s and 70s in dialogue with the music of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil or Gal Costa and the cinema of Glauber Rocha or Jack Smith.

In the case of the book by Celia Paul (India, 1959), the letter is the format chosen by the artist to talk about a painter she admires: the Welsh Gwen John (1876-1939). The author of the book “Self-portrait” also writes to her, in which she narrated the bond she shared with the consecrated artist Lucian Freud -when she was 18 years old and he was 55-, in texts that date between February 2019 and November 2019. 2020.

“Dearest Gwen, I know that this letter is an illusion. I know that you are dead and I am alive, and that no normal communication is possible between us, but ‘time is a foreign substance’ as my mother used to say, and who knows if, Beyond our comprehension of the world governed by temporality, there will not really be a channel through which we could speak if we knew how to do so”, Paul begins in the book published by Chai Editora.

The artist is concerned with making it clear that it is not a biography of her colleague but the desire to talk to him about the things they share: “One of the main reasons that motivates me to talk to you is this: I am increasingly aware that they are referring to us in relation to men. The public gaze always associates you with your brother Augustus and your lover, Auguste Rodin. They see me in the light of my relationship with Lucian Freud. They do not consider us autonomous artists”.

The texts from Paul to John end with the same line: “With a handshake” and allow you to enter an atmosphere of intimacy where there is room for reflection on motherhood, love combined with an admiration that at times can become suffocating. and creativity as an exercise in concentration.

Translated by the writer Esther Cross, in “Letters to Gwen John” the paintings of the two artists who are being quoted and recovered in Paul’s writing are also protagonists as a kind of vindication of their role as creators who run from the idea muse: “Our talent is absolutely independent of the men we were with, we do not derive from them in any way”, writes the author.

Art and the debates around its development traversed by the neo-avant-garde aesthetics of the 20th century are present in “Fantasmática del cuerpo”, a work prefaced by the critic and researcher of Brazilian literature, avant-garde art and Latin American cinema, Gonzalo Aguilar, in in which artists stage the question of the body interfered with by artistic expressions.

“Hélio and Lygia in their paradoxically constructed and programmed nomadic delirium, in their performances or in these letters that are sent bear witness to a friendship, a reflection on art and a life for invention”, Aguilar points out in the prologue.

Written from Rio de Janeiro, Paris or London, the letters transmit debate, urgency before a scenario, for example, of a dictatorship in Brazil, but also reflection and inquiry before the Woodstock Festival. And always a lot of love, the desire to hear from the other and to find in the letter the voice of that friend who is far away.

“I’m dying of nostalgia: you really are an irreplaceable friend, one of the very few people with whom I manage to communicate”, writes Hélio Oiticica in February 1964 and she answers him, in a letter without a precise date: “My love, always write to me , because I adore you, and I think that you are increasingly important in your own work. I liked the drawing of the new box immensely, you go deeper and deeper into the problem”.

The stories of what they see in the theater, read or dream about give thickness to that intimacy that makes reading emotional in which there is humor and irreverence to tell what they should read or work on. “I saw a Visconti movie, ‘Les damnés’, which is terrible, and also shows an enormous complacency for all the stupidities of the unconscious: it’s shit,” Clark tells him at one point.

The book also presents the materiality of these exchanges: from a typed and a handwritten letter to photos of some of their works to help enter the universe of two key artists to think about the perception put into play in artistic creation.

The third of the recent books that puts epistolary exchange at the center is “Letters. Between heart and reason”, a publication that brings together 122 letters written over 25 years that mark the friendship relationship promoted by the writer, editor and translator Victoria Ocampo with the Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset.

The author of “La rebellion de las masas” and the author of “La laguna de los nenúfares” met in 1916 during the philosopher’s first trip to Argentina and she asked him for a collaboration for the magazine that bore his imprint: Sur .

From that moment on, this epistolary conversation was established in French, which in this book is published in that language and translated into Spanish by Cecilia Verdi, who in the text she wrote about that task and precedes that exchange, says: “The correspondence between Victoria Ocampo and José Ortega y Gasset offers, without a doubt, an incomparable testimony of the personal friendship and the intellectual and professional bond that united two key protagonists of the cultic relations between Europe and America.But, beyond their inestimable documentary value, the letters do not leave of being, as Victoria maintained, ‘fragments of life'”.

As the letters follow one another, the Spanish promoted the magazine of the West; she the magazine Sur, a publication that took on the task of disseminating national and foreign authors in our country without established names in the cultural scene.

In the letters, she refers to her friend’s articles in the newspaper La Nación and tells him about her plans for the project for which he suggested the title: Sur magazine.

From Paris in 1930, for example, Ocampo summons him to travel to see her and describes that city: “Paris always the same. That is to say, a place that I adore as a whole and that annoys me in detail. The French are increasingly closed to everything that is alien to them. But I can’t do without Paris for the moment.”

In this way, the three recent books take up the letter as a genre that bets on conversation over time that manages to combine the intimacy of a bond but also the power of that written word as a testimony of an era with its dilemmas, its complexities and your challenges.