José Luis Blanco Exhibition at CLAS & fundraising event Saturday 21 October, 2-5pm with live music from Latin America!
This term the work of José Luis Blanco can viewed in room 204, CLAS, Alison Richard Building, West Road, Cambridge.
The work can also be purchased. Please contact Julie Coimbra for details.
Thank you to all who gave so generously &/or bought some of José Luis Blanco's work. José Luis is extremely grateful and sent this letter of thanks. (English translation).
Artist’s statement
To live a life trying to see, to feel, to understand!
Dazzled by words, amazed by colours, by shades, by nuances, overpowered by shapes, hypnotized by sounds, attempting to make sense of so many things like movement, or temperatures or void, or simply the blue sky on a shiny day, the sea, physical phenomena, emotions and premonitions by the use of reason, failing to grasp meaning, striving to keep faith alive. Trying to understand Faith and realizing that there is nothing to be understood from faith by means of logic reasoning.
It is just life happening, life being, life committed to be life. And despite the wonderful myriad of miracles occurring at every second of the time, sometimes I can’t help having the sensation that one is living and seeing and listening and feeling from a point of view as if one were some kind of miniscule being, trapped in all sorts of miserly day to day business, surrounded by a sort of a fauna which let show like an aura their true intentions, purposes, fears, their sadness and loneliness, their ambitions all disguised with the mask of hope.
To walk in the streets of my city, picking up traces, signs of an epoch, a time that is fleeing, to stand on a corner listening to bits and pieces of loose conversations, vendors’ callings to attract people to their merchandises, local and idiosyncratic verbal expressions so rooted in the history of the city’s inhabitants, seeing with great sadness how my city tumbles, collapses in front of the eyes of the people.
Feeling inside your bones an icy cold when you hear the scary shrieks of the tyrant giving orders and making threats to everyone who dare to oppose his rules. The insolence of a misappropriated power. But at the same time feeling inside your heart how Poetry can still survive.
Preserving in your memory parts of a big History, bringing them to mind by means of the humble token transfigured in an old piece of an advertisement, or of a discarded restaurant bill receipt found in a forgotten corner of a cupboard. Old bank notes now in disuse, pieces of paper that could have been a lottery voucher or an invoice from some shopping.
Our small world in small piece of watercolour paper, shining like gems, Virgin Mary, prints of the portrait of an Independence hero, the outline of a young boy converted in a target, Old Italian reproductions of a neoclassical and somehow decadent work of a forgotten sculptor. Canons for the new world. Aesthetics for the statuary of a military regime.
My little world as the option of a wonderful dream. The rescue of Poetry, the sense of magic, the awareness of sacredness, the gist of a pseudo platonic geometry, Postcards from the land of one hundred years of solitude. Postcards from a place and people that deserves to see the world from a more ample point of view.
My world from a point of view of the Wonderful.
Jose Luis Blancot.
May 2017.
