PRATIK'S CURRENT ISSUE SPECIAL: MARIÁN PAUER ON LUKA BRASE’S ART

 

MARIÁN PAUER

Wings of his Heart

A Review of Luka Brase’s Art

 

One day, LUKA BRASE took a deep breath and knocked firmly on the door of the secret chamber. The squeaking door revealed hidden dreams and airships, unfulfilled loves and desires for beauty, wings of butterflies and rainfalls, which had not yet fallen, but were about to descend. ... He entered the room where people go to dream with their eyes wide open and so did a career of devotion and growth begin.

When Luka paints his dreams, a confident line crosses the canvas and pulsates in the rhythm of his heartbeat. In a moment, the line climbs up steeply, then rushes down into a free fall, changes its course and turns right only to twirl left the next second. One line replaces the other, but neither of them drowns in the sea of the drawing. There is always enough space for both the rural landscape and the skyscrapers of the big city, for a sense of belonging and loneliness. Figures dance, spinning their daily wheel of fortune, which sometimes creaks, and it might even break, but once it is repaired, it will again embark on its endless quest through the cradle to the cross. You can either join that enchanting dance, or just watch from aside, listen in silent astonishment and follow the painter’s hand. The hand of a creator who cannot contain everything within his own being, who must share himself, to the last piece of his substance. He carries an endless number of paintings inside him and he can only ease the eternal unrest within by ceaseless work. For Luka, canvas, line, color, shape – they create a world in which he can tell his truth, be himself. For art is formed as love: always pushed to its limit, without relying on someone else’s help.

 

On the last pages of his previous book – LUKA BRASE Art on The Way Vol. 2 – Luka described himself, as a storyteller born as “a point in a line”, as “a drawing child…”

In Amsterdam, after visiting the van Gogh Museum, I kept in mind, that the Dutch painter was as well an all-time passenger on the way to station NOWHERE. Subconsciously, I have made a parallel with the eternal traveler Luka, but with a significant difference - on his journeys, he knows exactly where he is going and why he chooses the main streams, not the side paths. There haven’t actually been any sideways on his routes so far. So how to better characterize this eternally traveling artist? I wanted to write a painter, but he is also a glassmaker, or more precisely a painter painting on glass, and a photographer who enters photographs without knocking. He confidently paints his visions on acts of young women or lets two little birds fly into a snapshot of New York buzzing with people to remind the big city of nature’s delicateness. He strives to become one with light and paints it on evening silhouettes of buildings. He stores his dreams in tapestries, so that he can then enchant and light up the walls that build a home.

Music plays from the core of Luka’s paintings. With incredible ease, he sways with details inside his pictures. He loves the freedom of the canvas and encapsulates it with the precision of a watchmaker. All one has to do is watch and listen carefully. Through thy heart.

When you are looking at Luka Brase’s images through your heart, maybe one of the rainfalls, which had not yet fallen, will begin to descend. He may also wipe clear the dreams and unfulfilled desires, which have been covered in the dust of oblivion over time. Maybe a stream of further feelings and ideas will run through your mind. Maybe ...

 

To add a quote from Luka’s verses: ... “me a drawing child ... / awakening, discovering… liveliness / stories of love and hate / sadness and happiness / day and night / anywhere ... anytime / storyline through my eyes / into my hands / drawings ... wings of my heart / creating visual diaries: / The world in frames of my soul.”

Storyteller. A point in a line. Drawing child. An adult man who can still look at the world through a child’s eyes. Pure and undistorted. He dreams the dreams of beauty, of the infinite universe of the human soul. Our precious friend Dejan Mansfeld-Rupnik perfectly illustrates it when he quotes the worldly renowned artist Paul Klee: “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk” and adds that if you have grown up in the mountains, like Luka has in his beloved region of Orava near Dolný Kubín, you know for sure that going for a walk can also result in taking a long journey. And whenever Luka sees that artistic line, which has departed on an incredible journey through the fullness of life and love, it leaves him in silent amazement.

Nothing better and more beautiful is there left to be said and written. And so, I end here, because only Luka Brase himself can outdo his work by entering the secret chamber again. Carried by the wings of his heart towards an infinity of images.

 

Translated and edited by Zuzka Labska and Stefani Draganova

 

Luka Brase was born in 1983 in Czechoslovakia. He studied art at the Academy of Arts in Slovakia.

He has done 30 solo exhibitions in Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Hungary, Switzerland, Czech Republic, USA – New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, China – Shanghai and Beijing. 18 group participations in the Netherlands, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ireland, France among them important show in Künstlerhaus Wien, Afordable art fair Amsterdam, Accessible art fair Bratislava and Cite Internationale Des Arts in Paris.

His art is a part of the permanent collection in the Museum of Art – SUPEC Shanghai, China. His works belong to private collections in many countries in the world. He is the founder of project Art on the way and represented by DE Galerie in Den Haag, Netherlands and Artgogo gallery in Shanghai, China.

Luka Brase works and lives across Europe.

Marián Pauer /75/ has devoted more than four decades to professional photography as a historian, a theorist, and author of 31 publications, a curator of many exhibitions and a member of juries for international exhibitions and salons in Slovakia and abroad. He is author of several monographs, screenplays for television documentaries and radio shows.

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PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL : KEVIN DURKIN'S "Meditation"

 

KEVIN DURKIN

Meditation   

 

Cross-legged, eyes closed. Your thumbs and fingers touch.

Silent, one word repeats in your mind’s clutch.

 

You note each heartbeat, slow each breath you take,

as shoulders tingle and your strained knees ache.

 

Your thoughts keep swirling, water down a sink.

What do you think of when you should not think?

 

 

 

Winner of the 2015 Frost Farm Prize, Kevin Durkin has published in Poetry, New Criterion, Yale Review and the anthologies Poetry Daily, Able Muse Anthology, Irresistible Sonnets, and Measure for Measure. Finishing Line Press published his chapbook, Los Angeles in Fog, in 2013. Currently a managing editor at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, he resides with his wife and two daughters in Santa Monica.

 

 

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FROM PRATIK'S ARCHIVES : IRISH POET GERARD BEIRNE's POEM, " Vision of the Other World"

 

GERARD BEIRNE

 

Vision of the Other World

(Inspired by the works of don Francisco de Quevedo)

 

Astrologers, alchemists, crack-brained fools.

Petty-foggers cutting thongs out of other men’s leather,

 

boring their noses with hot irons, biting their nails to the quick.

Gawdy coxcombs and hob-nailed boots, scythes and sheep-hooks.

 

Contented cuckolds with pincers, crane-bills, scissors, saws.

Bare-necked women and all sorts of gee-gaws.

 

Jilts, cheats, picklocks, trepanners, tooth-drawers

picking a quarrel with their gums. Rooks and jackdaws,

 

sons of whores, crook-fingered and baker-legged, cramp-jawed

knaves and fools with their tongues steeped in oil.

 

Catch-poled blockheads.

The bones I speak of are dead.

 

 

Gerard Beirne teaches on the BA Writing and Literature Program, IT Sligo. He has published two collections of poetry and four books of fiction. He has been shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award,  the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards. 

 

 

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Pratik Highlight : JOSÉ GARCÍA OBRERO reviews Cuban American poet Víctor Rodríguez' Núñez's "linverse [2016-1979]"

 

 

Book Review

 

JOSÉ GARCÍA OBRERO

 

Marco Polo’s Dilemma

 

 

 

After reading this anthology, which accounts for a long, fruitful poetic calling, we might imagine Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (Havana, 1955) as a, “clockmaker’s hunch-backed apprentice” with a loupe in one eye, alone in his room late at night. There, he carefully places each word, each image, each enjambment, in the artifact of the poem, in order to provoke a certain strangeness in readers, making them delve into reality. We might also imagine the house where the watchmaker’s room is as being anywhere, more fixed in the sky than in a specific space, since the occupant is uprooted, a foreigner. Of course, the mihrab of this particular mosque is oriented towards Cuba.

Rodríguez Núñez grew up in Cayama, a village in Sancti Spíritus province, in the center of the Caribbean island. He is a descendant of Galician immigrants, class-conscious peasants and workers. There were no books in his house, as he says, “not even the Bible.” Self-taught and nourished by authors who would later set him on his poetic path, he began writing under the influence of Federico García Lorca, who taught him that poetry is thinking through images and rhythmic discourse. From the Peruvian César Vallejo, he took the idea that poetry is opposed to all ideology and, from the Mexican José Emilio Pacheco, that the poet must be trained as an intellectual. Among Cubans, Eliseo Diego offered up the texture of his verses, and Fayad Jamís, a visual depth.

The early period of Rodríguez Núñez’s poetry, spanning from 1979 to 2000 and six books, is marked by an openness to the universal, like “Marco Polo’s Dilemma”: “I’ve seen something of the world / and it only deepens my sorrow / nothing belongs to me.” More than once the poetic subject refers to himself as “the foreigner.” Ultimately, nothing human is alien to the poetic subject, and therefore nothing is alien to his poetry. This becomes evident in superb poems, so varied in their themes, like “The Captain” or “Madrid Nocturne.” Inspiration comes from a neighborhood soccer game, like in “Bogotano”, or from a tiny neutron, as in “Praise for the Neutrino.”

Up until 2000, Rodríguez Núñez’s books revolve around what has been referred to as conversational poetry. Soon, this way of understanding the poem became a prison, where he felt forced to define a signifier and a signified. The search to break with this model led him to organic poetry. It consists of writing without any preconceived idea, letting thought flow halfway between reason and the unconscious, though never becoming automatic writing. The author defines this poetics as the search first for poetry and then for the poem.

The change of course is fully materialized beginning with the two books that make up Midnight Minutes. They constitute one long poem, a torrent of images, divided into fourteen parts, where “just one night explains the world.” Here,, the night is a propitious, fertile terrain for the poet, as Spanish poetic tradition has demonstrated ever since San Juan de la Cruz’s “Dark night of the soul.”Yet, the limits of Romanticism are crossed, and the poetic subject declares, “I work to earn the night,” revealing the underside of the orderly life that forces us to earn a living. “Thirteen” stresses this idea:

          I’m one of those who die eight hours a day

              and are reborn in you

              I escape the case

              take off my fluorescent tag

              You’re alienation undressing

              your back is never turned

              At your breast I converge with the others

              in the same murmur

                                         I’m no longer merchandise

              only use value

Definitions of the night abound and the poem concludes: “Night’s made by all / of us the day’s put down.” The night becomes identification with freedom, poetry, the universe. And it comes naturally to politics: “There won’t be revolution / if we don’t let the night speak.”

The search for organic writing coincides with an awareness of the place from which the poet writes. Rodríguez Núñez lived in Cuba until 1988, and later resided in Colombia, Nicaragua, and the United States. This objective distance from the island has meant a subjective approach, as reflected in those verses by José Ángel Valente that say: “Leaving was the only way to stay forever.” Our poet not only writes “from Cuba,” he specifically writes “from Cayama,” a place where he became aware of the world; the origin.

In the United States, aided by contact with both another reality and a different language, he became aware of his otherness, but only in so far as it is a rejection of borders: “The development of an identity always goes through two stages: first, the awareness of difference; second, the awareness of identification. In my poetry I try to make identification prevail over differentiation, and to banish the perverse ideology of nationalism.” This notion is developed in different ways in books as tasks, reverses, thaw, and from a red barn.

With departures, the collection that won the coveted Loewe Prize, Spain’s most important award for an unpublished book of poetry, and which opens this anthology organized in reverse, Rodríguez Núñez returns to his native Havana, to nostalgia, understood in its etymological sense: to remember with pain. Exile is palpable, but paradoxically “the foreigner” gives way to “the compatriot of clouds,” a symbol of a space that belongs to no one and everyone. What comes to the fore is a notion that only the unnameable, the inapprehensible, is worthwhile, and that, perhaps, ultimately, the poet gives himself up to that pursuit because with it he frees himself from perfection, and thus achieves everything else, the pure beat of life.

Rodríguez Núñez’s work has been called “Spanish-American irrationalism” and “magical realism,” labels that the author qualifies: “Relinquishing realism does not mean turning your back on reality, but representing it with greater depth. . . What I have always sought, although at first I didn’t call it that, is a dialogical poetry. A lyric that rejects solipsism.” In his poetry, he gets his readers to experience estrangement, which leads them to see the world as they had not seen it before. To do this, he makes use of complexity, inconclusiveness, and darkness as reflections of our time.

In sum, Rodríguez Núñez understands his poetry as an elevated form of humanism: “I believe in poetry because it is the one thing that capitalism has not been able to turn into commodity, because it is a cardinal instrument of resistance against dominant dehumanization.” At the beginning of this review I evoke the poem “Nights,” where an image appears, a verse, that runs through this great Cuban poet’s entire oeuvre: “I am / if I may / a clockmaker’s hunch-backed apprentice / facing the broken mainspring of this world.” These poems, although torrential, are not automatic; they are tamed by the intellectual will and this is reflected in their verses: “The poem isn’t /a vessel adrift / horizon shipwrecked.”

 

linverse [2016-1979].

By Víctor Rodríguez Núñez.

Edited and translated by Katherine M. Hedeen.                                                          

Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2019.

 

 

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