Spanish poet master Jose Angel Valente (1929-2000) was not only the most singular and outstanding lyrical voice of Post-War Spain but also an insightful art critic, or more precisely a writer on art, for his words probably had no critical aim, positive or negative. He dedicated texts to those visual artists that were either personal friends or had influenced his poetry.
Any reader of Valente with a visual art memory would not fail to associate the words of the poet with the paintings of Mark Rothko (1905-1970). The sublime and the infinite, the metaphysical tragedy; the ethereal and the nothingness, the everythingness in the void. Rothko's oeuvre seems to have been created to be the most accurate painterly rendition of the poetry of Valente, or Valente's words spawned to describe the rapturing, expansive surfaces of hazy color of Mark Rothko.
Both the poet and the painter, the written artist and the visual one shared a vocabulary of essence, transcendence and pureness. Yet they never met, in paper, canvas or life.
Fate would eventually unite them. Valente and Rothko.
In 1999, already very ill with cancer, Jose Angel Valente visited in Paris what most likely was his last exhibition: the celebrated Mark Rothko retrospective that, originated in Washington, DC, and presented later in New York, was having its last stop in France. No written accounts or recollections exist of Valente's "first" and last dramatic encounter with Rothko.
Paris-based Ramon Chao, writer, journalist, radio broadcaster and a friend of Valente, has penned a brief and touching memory of that moment
(www.otrarealidad.net/opinion/ramon-chao/index.php?x=1832). It was Chao's last meeting with a dying Valente that was "finally" meeting Rothko. As "one of the most moving moments that I'll take to my eternity" describes Chao the time. It was Chao himself, he writes, who drove in his own car Valente and his wife Coral to the museum to see Rothko, saving the ailing poet not only the transportation but the long lines with his press pass.
"Dentro sentí que Valente vivía uno de los momentos más felices de su existencia".
("Inside I felt Valente was living one of the happiest moments of his life")
The curator of the 2003 exhibition "The Word and its Shadow. Jose Angel Valente: The Poet and the Arts" held in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain) begins her essay "The shadow of the word" imagining Valente staring at the last picture of the Rothko exhibition, one of the dark canvases made before his suicide, and feeling a connection between his poetry and Rothko's paintings.
I have tried to make visible the powerful, mesmerizing thought of Valente and Rothko together in the threshold of death in the following verses:
Ante el muro,
de luz.
Rodeado, absorbido.
Energía del vacio.
Lo sublime sangra sobre el lienzo.
El poeta de la nada,
materia y palabra precisa,
se encuentra en silencio
con el pintor del trágico infinito.
En el límite,
antes de morir.
(Valente/Rothko, Paris 1999)
Facing the wall,
of light.
Surrounded, absorbed.
Energy of the void.
The sublime bleeds over the canvas.
The poet of nothingness,
matter and word precise,
meets in silence
with the painter of the tragic infinite.
In the limits,
before dying.
(Valente/Rothko, Paris 1999)
