Has happened to Vicente Valero the same thing that happened to Cezanne, or Picasso, or Peter Handke. He has been enchanted by the magical mountain of Sainte Victoire, whose smoothness and edges do not deny the sensation of having fallen on earth, like a giant meteor that claims or tyrannizes for itself a totemic devotion. Valero includes the holy mountain among the shocks of a travel notebook he has written for the Periférica publishing house. Its titled
Otherwise, he would not have mapped the ladder to the top of Mont Ventoux, whose selective reputation among the cyclists competing on the Tour brings a certain prosaic character to the lyrical enthusiasm that enlightened Petrarch. There the Tuscan master remained absorbed. There he found the inspiration of his ‘Canzoniere’, as if the burning brambles predisposed “The exaltation of nature and the solitary individual”, writes Valero in his book of revelation.
Because Provence has been revealed to him in its light and in its mystery, perhaps suggested by the sensitivity of René Char and exposed to the influence of Cézanne, but also aware of the harmonious choreography between art, history and landscape.
The triangular dialectic revives a breviary written naturally and beautifully. Valero cultivates prose poetry in the chants that mark the “impressions” of the mystery of Provençal light, although the greatest bulk of the notebook comes from the mountain of Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne’s obsessive fetish of creation in the open. “Watch her. What an impulse, what an imperious thirst, what melancholy ”, writes the painter in a trance state. “These blocks were made of fire and they still have fire. The shadow, the day, seem to be afraid of them and tremble backwards: up there is the cave of Plato: observe when the big clouds pass, the shadow that falls shaken on the rocks, as if burned, as if it were a great ball of fire ”.
It is understood that Cézanne dedicated 80 specific works to the Sainte-Victoire mountain. It is also understood that the Platonian allusion was a way of proclaiming itself as a demiurge of art to come.
An old story, as old as that of the creative spirit on the other side of the mountain, where dazzling sunrises explode that those who make their home in the placidity of the valley or in the shadow of the slope can hardly contemplate. Cézanne was coming from the other side of the mountain. No one cared to understand him or understood his resistance to Impressionist militancy, least of all among the children who laughed at his appearance and among the adults who were suspicious of his misanthropy.
Cézanne liked to climb between the ramps of the Promenade de La Marguerite to gut the belly of the Sainte-Victoire mountain, whose geometric shadows and recesses housed the mystery of cubism.
Patience, faith and perseverance
Any viewer, anyone, can see the evidence … but Cézanne was the first to notice her. A matter of patience, faith and perseverance. A matter of perseverance and stubbornness, because Cézanne kept his easel up while the wind and the rain of October 1906 held him and shook him like a bearded wimp who had lost his mind. He died on the 21st due to pleurisy, although the aseptic evidence of the medical report pales in comparison to the epitaph written by his neighbor and friend. Emile Zola: “My friend Paul Cézanne died painting. As I wanted. As I always had ”.
There’s Nuño
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The answer also fits the biography of Picasso. How the devotion of the Malaga teacher to the patriarch Cézanne fits in. So much so that the walls of the Provençal castle of Vauvenargues, today naked, undressed, ill, housed half a century ago the paintings that Picasso acquired from his French colleague. Some of them were hung in the Granet Museum. Others have ended up in galleries and institutions in the Gulf, although the Picassian inventory of the castle is important because it denotes his tastes and because it reveals the deities of his pantheon: Matisse and Cézanne first. Renoir Y Modigliani. Monet Y Georges Braque.
Picasso slept on a Spartan cot and had the flag of Catalonia on his headboard
“What is, deep down, a painter?”Picasso wondered in conversations with the dealer Kahnweiler. “A painter”, they answered, “is one who collects the works of others to find himself reflected in them.” Picasso slept on a Spartan cot and had the flag of Catalonia on his head for republican reasons. The walls are bare, even chipped. There is a gray telephone, a massive cowbell on the floor, and a wooden desk that looks out onto the mountain of Sainte Victoire.
Jordi Corominas and Julián
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Picasso contemplated her at the foot of his castle. He did not dare to paint it, but he did have the audacity to acquire a few hectares, more than 1,000, as the Malaga artist quantified Kahnweiler himself in a letter with revanchist overtones. Not that Picasso lived too long in the Vauvenarges. What he did decide is to bury himself in the shelter of the mountain of Sainte Victoire. The master’s grave is so obvious that it seems invisible. It is rooted in a circular mound of grass, devoid of inscriptions, symbols and dates. The custody is the primitive sculpture of the offering woman. Picasso, in fact, conceived it in 1937, like Guernica, and it was his last wife, Jacqueline, who arranged to bury the master under the lap of the bronze matron, surrounded by ancient cedars.
Art, history, landscape. Here are the coordinates of Valero’s breviary, an abstract compass that recognizes in Provence the ancient footprint of Petrarch, the immanence of Sainte Victoire and the breath of a simple spike. “Morning greens, still cold. We must ceaselessly remember the certainty of the spike. Shooting stars grow in amazement. In it you can hear the ancient psalmody of a river that does not exist but continues to give water to blind animals. All the clarity flows in its night, intact and abundant, it pours on the black earth the seed of transformation, the future of the word, its new light ”.
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