An American Springtime

ARARIPE OF COLORS

Goes ahead that I am not critical of art and that only by friendship with Oscar Araripe I dare to write these lines, still to risk of mistaking to me, although always I will have left the excuse to blame him to request me something so other people's to my will and, mainly, my office, that is the television.

I have a pleasing memory of a book, which I read many years ago, of the Spanish writer, Eugene D'Ors, "One hour in the Museum of the Prado". That guide accompanied to me as lazarillo by one of the most important Museums of the world and showed many things to me that I did not know on the painting and the painters. That guide taught to me nonsingle to watch, taught to me, mainly, to see, to see the essential of a work, nonsingle with the eyes, but specially with the heart. Antoine of Saint Exupéry explains in " The Little Prince l", when he says that the essential is invisible to the eyes. The painting is also often invisible to the eyes, mainly to the eyes of the profane ones like I, that single we can "feel" the painting because we do not have the formation sufficient to understand it. It is from that optics as I see the pictures of Oscar Araripe. I feel many things when I am in front of them. Their full landscapes of flowers, light, water, of sky, make me evoke the Terrenal Paradise before the creation of the man. There are men nor no women in those pictures, the man has still not been created, everything is clean, of immaculate neatness, almost obscene. The only prodigious alive beings are those butterflies that, as it happens in the mystery of the Immaculate Conception, crosses the Paradise just as a sun ray it happens through a crystal, without breaking it nor staining it. Buterflies comprises of the landscape, are in him, but they can leave it voluntarily, like clouds of Magritte. For me butterflies symbolizes the purest innocence. The landscape never is innocent, it is to the delay of the man and can change and in fact it is going to change. Butterflies, like the angels, is spirits who cannot be contaminated, because if they did it they would die. In all the pictures of Oscar Araripe I see multicolors butterflies, when they are not even; its absence makes omnipresent, is listened to beating of its wings, perceive its colors, feels like its magic. Magic is what I perceive in the painting of Oscar Araripe, the magic of a wise man who stops in the essential, because the essential is not invisible to its eyes. Oscar Araripe watches and sees and dot which ahead has as the children watch and see, with that intelligence and that depth who single have they and very few adults. Oscar is one of those children, does not ask itself, like Pablo Neruda, where is the boy who I was, that boy always goes with Oscar, he never lost it, and that note in his pictures. Oscar plays with the colors, he robs them of the Nature and he fixes them with glue to his pictures so that do not take off it. In his paintings there are robbed fragments of his native Ceará, of Tiradentes, of Porto Seguro, of all the places through where he has happened. Oscar has taken with himself fragments of landscapes, beaches, trees, flowers, houses, and in his place there are now enormous hollows, because this great thief who is Oscar Araripe has put them in his pictures, without concerning the protests to him of people. We also are accomplices of that expolio, but we robbed Oscar to him, we snatched with the glance everything to him what their paintings contain, we took all their colors, all his borboletas, because it would be a crime that Oscar remained with them and he did not share them with anybody. Oscar Araripe is a thief of white glove, for that reason it is a mystery that has so many colors in its trowel. Blue of the sea and the blue one of sky, and red and green and the yellow and the orange of its flowers, and the rainbow of his butterflies, all it lapses the lapidaria phrase of Ives Klein "the man has been exiled far from its colored soul". In the pictures of Oscar Araripe we discovered the Paradise in which, they say what they say, we never were. The Paradise is inside a butterfly that slides by an immensely blue sky, but, like all the essential things, he is invisible to our eyes.

Vicente Botin

Head of Spanish TV in La Habana/Cuba

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