A matter of ecstasy, to find oneself far away in the elsewhere.
Motionless space is barely in balance down here,
with no more me, no dreams, no awareness.

So many ifs, in the sense of questions that turn into places.
So many necessary absences. No more bodies or thoughts.
And the eyes wait on the far side. On our side?
No, on the side of the others…

So: we see the eyes of the imagination,
astonished to see nothing.
In the invisible there is no room for mystics of words
nor even for visions.
There is nothing there to see or to feel.

Here one is as far as possible from everyone;
to rejoin the absent we should turn to stone:
make ourselves rock, to make sacred the knowledge of the fleshless.

Deluded and lost, from so much searching, some entrust themselves to God,
others to art, and yet there is a single place where all is made sacred. (Becomes sacred)

“Air, aerial form, subtle vibration,
dilation, contraction, defeat
hold sway, in the space beyond us;
colour, in its tedium, fades,
kindles with dawns and sunsets,
then, weightless and without memory, ebbs away.”

Deluded into thinking they could fill the voids, they raised immense monoliths
or dug out chasms. Aspiring to skies too blue to be true
or to the boiling heart of the unreachable source.
Babel or Utopia, forever castaways in the desert or in the ocean.

Often seeking repose in harmony, without grasping that only
the secret of dissonance could reconcile them with silence.
And so only the most watchful lose themselves in the vague mist of the eternal approximation
to truth, while the lives of others are steeped through and through
with cackling laughter and pains that have neither name nor origin.
Wrong sums of memories and imaginings.
Additions that yield glimmers of time turned into light,
like a slow hourglass that does not run but, rising undecided, becomes sun.

Thoughts, in truth, do not love the invisible, and the fault lies with the light.
Certainly not with the night, which ferments the dark with elusive, clumsy beings.
And yet thought, like a cloud too pale and too dense,
keeps spreading through our minds,
until the unknown wind of beatitude,
as it blows, turns them to mist and then scatters them.

That vanishing is true peace: a prayer of happiness.
For the sacredness of the wind is not freedom, but nothingness:
a distance that draws near, brushing the painter with its breath.

Paolo Nardon

Paolo Nardon, born in Narni (TR) on 13 November 1963, studied at the D.A.M.S. in Bologna and later earned his qualification to teach the History of Art to foreign students at the Università per Stranieri di Perugia. Since 1997 he has taught various courses at the “Pietro Vannucci” Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, among them: History of the Performing Arts, Anthropology of Art, and the Economics and Market of Art. Over the years he has worked intensively as a critic. From 1993 to 1998 he was curator of the Trevi Flash Art Museum; also from 1993 onwards he has overseen the staging of numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad. To his name are numerous essays, articles, reviews, critical texts and even a novel. Since 2013 he has been an Honorary Academician of the “Pietro Vannucci” Academy of Fine Arts Foundation in Perugia.