Things happen and things move. Things transform. Things repeat themselves. They take on metamorphosis. Time is metamorphosis. Time is an internal, invisible change. Time is captured, and then denied, obliterated. Things move and distribute themselves according to unforeseen regularities. Everything is repetition and everything is difference. Duration. Atmosphere.

Maybe only the reverberation of an experience matters. Something reverberates, something that is akin to a fully shared representation, or at least asks for this expectation, this belief. Ragnar Kjartansson asks us to take the simulacrum for the real. So many times has he played the role of an actor that he made himself an actor. So many times has he returned to the enigma of assuming a seemingly extrinsic identity, that he allowed himself to be contaminated with that possibility. So many times has he took the risks of depersonalization that something happened in the name of an essence. That happening is the transfiguring event that his art celebrates. We recoil from it but find it difficult to think about it. We dive into it and are contaminated by its perfection. The perfection that only experience — and the vertigo it summons — can still retain.

No artist speaks to us yet of that time without time in which we recognize the power of reverberations. No artist seems to be concerned with the ways of folding time as if it were a sheet of paper. Folding time to better suspend it, to better reify it, as if it were a sculptural piece. To sculpt time and to show us how time is matter and shadow of that eternity. Suspension. Theater and music are the instruments of shadow and melancholy from which this hypothesis is drawn.

No artist, we say. An artist now, alone in the landscape as the forest closes in around him, and we, for a moment, subject to the enchantments of the clearing.

Luís Quintais
March 2023