Art to Express What Doesn’t Yet Exist

|leer en español|

Every piece of art emerges from an idea and the expression of that idea as a response to the need to create, to explore the limits of the known world to make something new.

“Limit” is the notion that helped the Spanish philosopher Eugenio Trías elaborate a thinking that searches the meaning of the world. What remains besides the limitation is the world as such, it’s the known, the place from where us men come from. The “other” is what’s outside the limit, it’s the unknown. The limit is the sense of identity and the difference at the same time.

The World’s Limits

“Art is the human task that pushes creativity towards the world’s exploration and starts to recognize its limits and, for a while, to cross them. Art leads us to the experience that can indicate where the world ends and where it starts. If in our daily life we deal with things, with the objects we use and that we recognize as normal, art is the hyperbole of the everyday life, it pulls us out from that ordinariness and it reinstalls us in the world in another way: it obligates us to ask ourselves about the world’s limitations, about the significant range of our habits, and of everything that appears in them. The role of art is, among others things, to clarify or reveal, through an extension of the experience, what for the daily eyes remains hidden”, the philosopher wrote in his book, The World’s Limits.

For Eugenio Trías, art helps us to understand the world in a better way: “It’s one of the biggest instruments that men have to survive, in one side, and that intelligence has to enjoy, on the other side. Art is a real compass for our ability to enjoy. And, I insist, it’s a way of knowledge.”

Art like a Place of Expression and Invention of the Meanings that Make the World Habitable

“Expression”, according to the Oxford Dictionaries, is “The conveying of feeling in a work of art or in the performance of a piece of music.” The process of creation –conceived as the process of experimentation, of search, of expressing an idea– is a residual process. In other words, to take out the leftovers, to only leave the remains, understanding these as the necessary. Creating in art extends the definition of the habitable in the world by breaking the limits of the unknown and converting them into habitable and known by the man. The creative process initiates without knowing what you will find, it’s a trip to the unknown, to what so far didn’t belong to this world. Like in the odyssey of Ulysses, the trip itself becomes the goal, and the hardest thing is to know when to detach yourself from the work and give it closure, because one will not surrender until the search makes you feel satisfied.

Has it ever happen to you that you want to keep experimenting and what at the beginning looked like a process of taking out the leftovers in a search process, ends up becoming a labyrinth? To learn is to get lost; you have to lose yourself in order to find something. If you know the way, you won’t get lost, but you won’t find anything either.