Mexico 2014-2018 – Humberto Ortega Villaseñor

Exhibition in the Julio Cortázar Library

Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico 2014-2018

Another sky

One hundred years after his birth, Cortázar gets up and wake up with his words the dream of the living. How many stories revealed, how many poems and novels are among us. Beyond all temporal linearity, its contents are like whispers. Lights and shadows that can only generate images of frontiers that always travel between the real and the fantastic.

As Gabriel García Márquez once said, I saw him enter as an apparition. He was the tallest man you could imagine, with the face of a wicked child in an endless black coat that looked more like the cassock of a widower, and his eyes were wide apart, like those of a bull … Years later, I thought back to see it as I saw it that day, because it seems to me that he perfectly recreated himself in one of the best-finished stories – The other sky -, the character of an unnamed Latin American who attended purely to the executions in the guillotine. As if I had done it in front of a mirror.

According to Carlos Fuentes, for Cortazar reality was mythical in this sense: it was also in the other face of things, the minimum beyond the senses, the invisible location only because we did not know how to reach out in time to touch the presence that it contains . That’s why Cortázar’s eyes were so long: they looked at the parallel reality, just around the corner; the vast latent universe and its patient treasures, the contiguity of beings, the imminence of forms waiting to be summoned by a word, a stroke of brush, a hummed melody, a dream.

The outside and the inside. All this reality on the eve of demonstrating was the revolutionary reality of Cortázar. Their political positions and their poetic art were configured in a conviction, and this is that the imagination, the art, the aesthetic form, are revolutionary, they destroy the dead conventions, they teach us to look, to think or feel again.

Julio Cortázar, Tribute, 1914-2014

November 2018, Seat of the Julio Cortázar Chair

Universidad de Guadalajara, CUCSH

Guadalajara, Jalisco, México