Ran across a miniseries about an itinerant hypnotist, ‘el hipnotizador,’ on latin HBO, and started watching even though it was in portuguese, I think, with subtitles in spanish, and I speak neither. It was visually so rich, the plot seemed so surreal and strange, and the music mingling symphonic emotion with scratchy sound effects was so evocative, scene for scene, that I decided to watch a few of episodes anyway. Some weeks later I discovered the same series with english subtitles and watched again, this time with dialogue.
In the second season, Arenas, the hypnotist, arrives in a strange colony peopled by state-funded zombies, suicides who had been reanimated and implanted with artificial memories, living out bland but contented lives. His presence jostles their memories and they start to recall their prior existences, and why they had wanted to kill themselves. The whole experiment is run by a painter who has put his abstract paintings up all over town as a kind of early warning system. When people start to see butterflies in his paintings, it means they’re about to ‘wake up.’
Now that’s a novel idea, paintings that aren’t static at all but which move and resolve when consciousness changes, still, it’s the most plausible part of the plot. The renaissance is an enshrined example, there in your hometown art museum, of humanity changing its mind, seeing reality in a new way. Linear perspective, an expression of Aristotle’s rationality, redefined the world in paintings first of all, and then in the minds of all who saw them. It’s difficult to imagine how strange the new art must have looked at first to the medieval mind, or how it started clicking into place when another consciousness arose.
Art isn’t frozen on the wall but exists in the interaction between artist and viewer, a collaboration, a conversation. All art is abstract when you think about it. Raphael, himself, was only making colored designs on cloth, and it’s the viewer who perceives depth, recognizes steps, and trees, and clouds. Wouldn’t it be peculiar if a representational painting were suddenly seen as abstract, colors and patterns in relation only to each other, the internal world of the artist made visible? Wouldn’t it be crazy if one day you looked into a piece of art and saw something you’d never seen before, even when you’ve looked at it every day? Would it be like waking up, maybe a little, a bell ringing far away.
The artist doesn’t have answers, only method, yet in the execution at the top tenth of their ability some things come across, how to say, unintended. Universal and poignantly real, no matter what they happen to be painting, certain values of character or wit rise to the surface past the pot of flowers, a desert sunset, the modest portrait of young person unknown, grown old and deceased by now. Are we all hypnotized, they ask this question several times, and no one ever really says for sure, but wouldn’t it be prudent to now and then look at paintings intently, ready to see them change?
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