The knowledge of silence is more than necessary to understand the essence of human. — Ekhart.

“Silence speaks and We don’t listen” has the texture of stones and the depth of time. For Gerard Castellví, the transcendent is everything that emerges from a sacred space, its silence, which, as in Japanese culture, is not emptiness but fullness. “In silence the most important task is to do nothing. Nothing is to be pretended, achieved or conquered.” It is a conscious gaze without prerequisites, a letting go until the truth emerges.

I constantly reflect on what is truly hidden behind our perceptions. I question whether the way we experience sensations faithfully reflects the truth, that truth that we all long to discover and that often lies in the deepest recesses, that truth that needs to be unearthed and that, paradoxically, plunges us into uncertainty when we finally find it.

As María Zambrano would say, truth is not something we simply find, but is revealed in the clearings of the forest, in those moments of lucidity where knowledge and heart intertwine. The poetic reason that she defended invites us to understand that the deepest truth dwells precisely in that half-light between the visible and the invisible, in that sacred space where human beings recognize themselves both in their certainties and in their doubts, thus transforming simple knowledge into true experiential knowledge.

In this mystique of silence, painting is the flight forward, it is what follows the “phrase”, it is the theatrical situation that is afraid of not capturing fantasy. From the sediment of his rocks appears the figure and emerges that uncomfortable silence that tries to transmit deep truths without finding listeners, but that detaches the reality of the prevailing society, the times of noise.

Gerard Castellví is an intelligent poet who takes advantage of the eloquence of this silence and its existential imaginary. Embraced to his memories and to the limestone of the Prades mountains, to all its nuances, to the water, the moss, and the lichens that now come off the brush. A handful of oranges like the handful of arrows of Diana the Huntress, which unintentionally shoot all over the works in perfect harmony of the natural disorder of things; inhabiting the canvas with the first arrow that recalls her memory.

Discovering his landscape is like when you discover where the ants are going, a revealing moment towards the essential. It is John Cage’s 4.33 minutes, the vulnerable interlude towards understanding, it is to observe how the clouds melt or how the rocks acquire a face, in a space where everything takes shape and, simultaneously, everything ceases to make sense.

“Silence speaks and We don’t listen” is perceived as the possibility of contemplating a supernatural world from the poetic instant. Thus, stillness is transformed into revelation, and what seems inert contains, in reality, the murmur that can only be captured when the noise of the everyday world is turned off.

Victoria Rivers
Art curator and writer.