Martin Barré
61-T-12
1961

Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Isabel Villaseñor
1935

All
will be difficult to say:
the real word
is never easy.

All will be hard:
pitiless light
excessive living too
conscious of being.

All will be
able to wound. Will be
aggressively real.
So real it rends us.

There is no pity in signs
nor even in love: being
is excessively lucid
and word is dense and wounds us.

(All words are cruelty.)

— Orides Fontela, Speech, trans. Chris Daniels

Alexander Calder
Silver Bed Head, special commission for Peggy Guggenheim’s New York apartment
1946

Agnes Martin
Untitled
1961

Henri Laurens
Femme à L'Oiseau
1922

“By falling asleep, I fall inside myself: from my exhaustion, from my boredom, from my exhausted pleasure or from my exhausting pain. I fall inside my own satiety as well as my own vacuity: I myself become the abyss and the plunge, the density of deep water and the descent of the drowned body sinking backward. I fall to where I am no longer separated from the world by a demarcation that still belongs to me all through my waking state and that I myself am, just as I am my skin and all my sense organs. I pass that line of distinction, I slip entire into the innermost and outermost part of myself, erasing the division between these two putative regions.”

— Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. by Charlotte Mandell

Robert Mapplethorpe
Flower Arrangement
1986

Norman McLaren
A Phantasy in Colors
1949

wretched thou art wherever thou art
          I sit and work on a line and lean into the pain my mind               continues           trying to think and all I come up with is a texture without               ideas
and to whatever thou turnest —
          the body I have is the body I once had but they could not               differ more           the teacher Agnes says abstract form holds meaning               beyond words
   I turn the pages of the old book
          the way certain feelings come to us with no discernible               worldly cause             the teacher Buddha says the practitioner agitated by               thoughts
 
I have not held since childhood
 
          makes stronger their bondage to suffering and the sting               of becoming           during the time illness makes me feel most tied to the               material world

— Brian Teare, an excerpt from When we are on the right track we are rewarded with joy

[x]

Alexander Calder
Sans titre
1964

Sheila Metzner
Mouille Shapes
1986

John Zabawa
Water Stones
2018

Man Ray
Louisa Calder Wearing a Necklace Made by Alexander Calder
Paris, 1931