This group of drawn patterns is the first version of a subjective
interpretation of the short novel The
Temptation of Quiet Veronica [Die Versuchung der
stillen Veronika],
by
Robert Musil A second version,
in black and white, was previously shown in an exhibition called “Orla” (2012),
and printed in a book with the same name. In both versions, the starting point
for the interpretation was to translate the impressions caused by the novel
into patterns with shapes. The high degree of (a certain, non-figurative) realism
was achieved through an extremely precise and obsessive analyse of the writer’s
words. The novel was divided and sub-divided into moments of change – not of action
but of emotional stress between the three characters (Veronica, Johannes and
Demeter). To each of these moments corresponds a drawing where shapes and
colours were selected according to the glimpse of intensity of each singular change.
During the process, in which the artist was first a reader and later a visual
translator, it became clear that the re-creation (of the novel) was a self-assessment
practice. The patterns are the result of the artist’s submission to the
writer’s words, after reading and listening to its multiple echoes within its own
totality. Thus, it’s an attempt to internalize something that is considered to
be important/essential – similar to the process of process
through repetition, like when performing a homework duty. And yet it’s not
clear what the novel is about… despite its multiple layers of reading, it seems
obvious that it’s not the narrative of a simple love story between the three
characters or the development and culmination of a woman’s madness. In the end,
the reader can intuitively feel the exasperation with the complexity/diversity of
human passions and emotions that hardly flow in a single direction, as well as with
the impossibility of finding a defined object. For the artist, the difficulty to
express this complexity/diversity could only be solved through abstraction. This
solution (abstraction) was a way of exposing the inadequacy of verbal
expression, opening up space for other expressions. If it were possible to find
a pattern in the writer’s work that one could call “style”, it would be what
the artist saw and what decades later could be taken as an experience,
expressing/formalizing it in turn.
2013