Simone by Eduardo Lalo

Author:Eduardo Lalo [Lalo, Eduardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226207513
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

As time passed by, the blotches of black ink from her drawings grew and multiplied. She dropped the small-format notebooks and used progressively larger sheets of paper, which she kept in a portfolio case that I gladly gave her as a present, for which she was as grateful as a child. Her works invaded her room in the rooftop apartment at the restaurant, my house, and even, with one sublime piece, the horrid wall of my university office.

It was an elegantly crafted work. Successive rows of ink plowed across the paper’s surface to create areas of deep intensity. If the strokes had been drawn in a straight line, Li’s hand would have covered countless meters, but here her effort was concentrated on a few square centimeters. The lines erased their passage until they became a solid, pulsing body that took a mammoth feat of tedious and hypnotic labor. In the end, there was seemingly nothing or nearly nothing on the paper: a more or less purely geometric form with slight glimmers of white, the minimal patches of paper not covered by the tip of the pen. The result was austere and bedazzling and also constituted a powerful conceptual design. Rather than an erased drawing, like the famous de Kooning that Rauschenberg had painstakingly “erased,” Li’s drawing disappeared under the excess that seemed to penetrate the paper and, at the same time, to float above it. It was a nearly infinite series of strokes, and it was impossible to tell where or when they ended. She wasn’t interested in finding out, it was enough for her that it remained alive, covering its tracks, turning the finest line into the densest shading, the most insurmountable wall.

Progressively my enthusiasm grew greater. I had seen little art in recent years that aroused my enthusiasm. It would be easy to think I was blinded by love and all the associated clichés, but in the case of her drawings, quite apart from the desire that your beloved should be extraordinary, there was the brute fact of a body of work being created with equal discipline in all sorts of places and circumstances. Li carried her notebooks and rolls of paper with her and, indifferent to her surroundings, she got down to work. She only stopped when her stiff, cramped hand could not keep going.

Once, I told her she was a Penelope who, instead of undoing the shroud nightly, was constructing one so vast and dense it could never be completed. My comment was meant to be light, and I couldn’t have imagined the enigma contained in her reply. “Whether I wish it or not, I am waiting too,” she said, and kept on drawing, protecting herself with a silence I didn’t have the courage to break.

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