Herbert Read, an English art critic, among other humanist vocations, explains that Matisse acquired Trois baigneuses by Cézanne from a dealer. The painting cost him thirteen hundred French francs ---less than two current euros---. For Matisse, immersed in economic hardship, these less than two euros of the time represented an amount he could hardly afford. The painting became the dose of faith and perseverance necessary to combat the critical moments of his artistic career.
Matisse kept Trois baigneuses until 1936, when he donated it to the City of Paris Museum along with a letter in which he stated the vital transcendence the painting had for him. In 1898, a few months after acquiring Cézanne's work, Matisse painted a male nude in blue. This fact would not have more transcendence if it were not for the fact that the painting was intended to be a forceful declaration of Fauvism's rage against Saurat's Neo-Impressionism or a certain stage of Pissarro, who was Matisse's own teacher and who, apparently, emphasized the fixation on Cézanne.
For some modern art artists, like Matisse, blue was a resource through which to channel the impregnable and which, at the same time, trapped them. In some cases, we still find this dimension today in nostalgia, although contemporaneity tries to avoid it. Nostalgia is nothing more than an incomplete memory ---and therefore, being a memory, it implies a certain proximity--- full of gaps filled with coupled reality, reality that was not, but which we reconstruct by embellishing it. Blue, sometimes, also spits out the rage that alludes to the close, unknown, and desired, which could not be profaned. Miró said, of a certain blue, that it was the color of his dreams. Another variant of the encrypted dimensions.
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But why does such an unknown dimension trap the artist? The tentacles of the unknown, like roots, project underground to unexpectedly deep strata. It is at these depths that wounds stagnate like clots that feed the artist's voracity. The artist, rather than healing them ---the wounds---, will seek to expose them as they are the genesis of the desire that keeps him expectant.
John Berger said it in other words when he denounced living in a state contrary to that of thirst: "In this life, whoever has not suffered a wound must live without desire. Desire, he concludes, is a movement that consists of exchanging hiding places". Anyway, hiding places, shelters, although they protect, end up being uncomfortable. They distance us from uniformity. And from comfort. The hiding place is cold and is usually perfidious.
"In this life, whoever has not suffered a wound, must live without desire. Desire, he concludes, is a movement that consists of exchanging hiding places," said John BergerTrenches as salvation
Let us remember, if not, in the context of the wars of the early 20th century, the trenches where the enemy would sneak into the body of whoever considered themselves hidden from the other. As an anecdote: at the same time that Matisse ceded Trois baigneuses to the Museum of the City of Paris, Víctor Torres, who was the brother of Màrius Torres ---a poet who leaned towards blue: "Cap al tard, la boira s'esmuny. / Xopes de blau, arribaran de lluny, / un vespre càlid, orenetes"---, enlisted in the Columna Macià-Companys.
In 2011, in an interview months before he died, Víctor explained to me how the enemy trench saved his life. The events took place when he decided to light a cigarette in the middle of the night at the front line of fire; from the enemy side an insurgent voice warned him that they had him in their sights.
The blue of lovers
The color of the hiding place, that of the trench, is blue. It is so in that the atmosphere that surrounds it is the most accurate description of the unknown dimension. As is the moment before complete dusk; long ago, an epilogue to apocalyptic sermons that the priest brandished with his back to the resplendent redness of the sunset, which penetrated through the openings of the church facing west. Or as is the parenthesis of the afterwork, an atmosphere close to that of the hiding place that, sometimes, intersects with that which surrounds the infidelity of lovers. Lovers who must move with caution, who consider each other enemies due to the fatal attraction that keeps them in desire, even fearing the devaluation of attraction towards the other and the consequent decline into hostility. Hostility that will end up manifesting itself in the form of tragedy.
The blue of lovers is the blues of music. It is soul. It is pure thirst. Last June, Ashley Madison, the most frequented website by unfaithful people, published a study on new adhesions to the platform during the confinement of early 2020. Barcelona led the ranking of cities in the State, followed by Girona, in second position, and Tarragona and Lleida, in eighth and tenth.
Infidelity is the passion for approaching and surrendering to the unknown, and the 21st century, in full exaltation of social networks, has become the ideal ecosystem to cautiously discover people in our environment whose behavior outside the daily or forcibly shared sphere ---for example, work--- we are unaware of. Through networks, one can spy. To bring them into the imagination without impediments or contemplations. To obey them and make them obey. To satisfy them and make them satisfy. But even so, there is only one way to unleash desire: to possess.
The motels of Santiago de Chile
In 2014, Barcelona-based photographer and producer Anton Briansó co-led the Motel project, an excellent graphic work resulting from having toured some of the rooms prone to infidelity in downtown Santiago de Chile. Until the COVID-19 health crisis, dozens of couples decided to enjoy a break from routine would visit the rooms daily.
The motels in downtown Santiago de Chile were dens where the figurative beliefs about sex in Chilean society, which records the highest degree of infidelity in Latin America, were made real. And also for couples looking to pursue a formula that combined creativity and delirium, beyond what the bathroom, kitchen, or bedroom at home could offer. The offer was formidable: hidden rooms in discreet buildings, camouflaged in the middle of the city, with the added option of carnivals ranging from the recreation of a cocktail bar, a prison, a gynecologist's office, or the simulation of a flight on a Boeing 737.
Motel, the project, was developed over two weeks. The images were taken during the lunch break, between two and four in the afternoon, coinciding with the period of maximum influx. It is easy and perhaps logical that it is so. We spend many hours in the office, in class, behind the supermarket cash register, at the wheel of a delivery truck... Consequently, more than being in contact, it is imperative to get in contact. The access key: the pact of silence.
Before the strange context we are currently living in, Chilean motels adapted to a growing lifestyle that generated a business volume of 40 million dollars a year. Motel, the project, concluded by apologizing for not being able to faithfully transfer the extensive palette of textures and smells; a mixture of tobacco, damp towels, and sweat. Anyway, at a certain age, as happened to Matisse with the painting Trois baigneuses, we have learned to evoke the unknown and transcribe it to the senses, combining it with the blue of great occasions.