Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego ///

CELAN & ROTHKO: dialogues in the shadows

Sea of ice

Heinrich von Kleist’s comments on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Monk on the seashore might be the opening of a text on Celan and Rothko, given that his words already promise the cruel future crossing of suns that disintegrate into threads, of communions with death, exile or desolation, into furtive stigmas of absolute shadow: “It is magnificent to direct our gaze toward an limitless marine desert, in infinite solitude on the seashore beneath the overcast sky. This implies however that one has gone there and has to come back, that one would like to go further but can’t, that everything required for life is missing and that nevertheless the voice of life can be heard in the roll of the waves, in the whistle of the wind, in the passing of the clouds, in the solitary screeching of the birds. This implies a demand of the heart and a rupture, so to speak, caused by nature. But looking at the painting this is impossible and what I needed to find in the painting itself was something I found the first time as something interposed between the painting and me, that is to say: a demand that my heart made toward the painting and a rupture that the painting caused within me.