Why we are still in semidarkness?

© Eduardo Ruigómez

Decent people take along their shadow when they go under the sun!
(Adelbert von Chamisso)

Ξ In the editorial from (see nº 24) was signaled the impact of Romanticism in art history and how it affect artists facing their work. Renaissance canons are left behind, when Beauty and Harmony were leading concepts in the path for creativity. It is then when arises the early curiosity for the space created in chiaroscuro, lights and shadows in agreement.

In the19th century this path of clarity and freshness is broken, difficult to recover. They are times of evolution in science, economics, philosophy; industrial bourgeois revolutions, art by the art. Nearly two centuries after the Renaissance truth succumbs in the grim basements of oblivion.

With the advent of the Impressionism, the avant-garde arises. The impressionists appeal to the shadows provided by the photographic technique, allowing them to capture images in the field that later will be reflected in oil paintings done in their ateliers. … And the shadows, black, of more or less intensity, are no longer shadows adopting the presence of a misty reflection, shining and colored with the dyes attuned to the reflecting forms that originated them.

In the realm of photography light and shadows acquire a fundamental dimension. Specially in white and black images: with less information (color) the perception nourishes, in greater extent, from our imagination, amending the vision of the image reaching higher levels of interpretation , a versatility of light that can reach sublime chiaroscuros.

If we speculated what would have happened if Romanticism never befall possibly we would have to discard the occurrence of Impressionism decades later. But as we never know what might have happened is better not to speculate and keep tied to the facts of history. Let us think that the lethargic (drowsy) kingdom of light awaits the coming of new times of splendor, allowing the penumbras a time of rest that move away the mists of a rowdy swamp.

Ξ Shadow moves lightly, it is able to contort nimbly to throw fantastic forms. Not as the figure which is bounded to a leonine contract with the matter that supports it until immortality, the shadow is playful, whimsical, rebellious. Foolproof traveling companion, the shadow only fears the night, which speaks in her favor. The shadow complements the richness of light that shines by itself and imprint splendor to anything that she touches.

The spiderwebs of imagination start when we open our eyes and look our environment with no understanding of the space that surrounds our emotions, as much as they reveal the dreams we drag and breed the stimuli of creativity, a thick shadow that Odilon Redon forwards to the coves of the unconscious.