Ramón Gaya: "Creo que soy poeta pintando"

Abstract

Simonides of Ceos, who defined poetry as a speaking picture and painting a mute poetry, contributed to the rise of philosophy of art, the basis of modern Western aesthetics. For the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce art is the aesthetic synthesis of intuition and expression through lyrical language. It embodies the representations of beauty, a universal event that doesn’t concern History nor art criticism. In a more radical way, Ramón Gaya refused this same knowledge since he was a very young painter, disappointed by avant-garde. His approach to works of art is close to a mystic attitude. It emerges when he faces Velázquez’s painting in Spain, before going into exile in Mexico. His transcendental feeling increases when he visits Venice for the first time, in 1952, and he associates painting with water flow. It is the first step of a sacred identification of arts –painting, poetry, sculpture and music– with nature and its cosmological elements. The Venetian experience gives birth to a new iconic and verbal creativity. Painting always involves an enigmatic duality, keeping features of its mysterious source. The poems that Ramón Gaya dedicated to Michelangelo's Dusk are a specimen of his unconventional intertermediality, where the diaphanous technique in painting corresponds to the use of logical negation in the verbal language. This linguistic strategy is in line with the essays dealing on the same topic.