CHRISTINE SAFA
L’habitude du ciel
Paris
6 November 2021 – 15 January, 2022
WORKS EXHIBITED
ARTIST PAGE
PR FRANÇAIS | PR ENGLISH
here, from where I begin, for to that I shall return»1
Perhaps we look at the things we love with the same intensity as those we have already loved, with memories of what we felt at a given moment in time, thereby giving rise to ripples of tenderness.
I look at the sun drowning in the sea, as if I were watching the person I love sleeping.
Often when we find ourselves in one place, we think about another and, as a result, a feeling of nostalgia organically sets in; by simply thinking of another moment, we feel a magnificent desolation, a sense of sadness. I accept being here.
I know another place that is always by my side; the subject is no more than the contact of my body with everything around it, the weather, synaesthesia, a fundamental state: being here.
Like an affinity, caught in the embrace of two distinctly different sensations and without trying to find a resemblance, I feel that I have found something: a moment, a position, a place where my heart once swelled - sometimes a movement that fosters joy.
Light bathes one side of the mountain, as if it could reveal and evoke the contours of a face. And so the forehead becomes a mountain.
The landscapes we observe are informed by all sorts of sentimental values, impressions and emotions: as such, they become interior as much exterior.
Being accustomed to these places that are full of feelings, the importance of being able to return to somewhere where joy and sorrow mingle, of having always understood the fragile nature of time.
After a difficult and absurd day, the setting sun is always full of promise.
Trying to use intuition to reconstitute
what the mind has always known,
the memory of a sky that has never left me.
“Nothing is as precious as this time in our life, this infinitesimal morning, this imperceptible point in the firmament of eternity, this minuscule spring that will only exist once and then never again. The cockerel sings and daylight shines. Get up my love, it’s time. It’s time: Hora!
In a short while it will be too late, for this time lasts but an instant; the wind is picking up and it is now or never. Do not miss your only opportunity in the whole of eternity, do not miss your only spring morning.”2
1 “On Nature” (fragment 5), Parmenides.
2 “Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien 1“, Vladimir Jankelevitch.
