Looking at your whites is like breathing
by Margarita Garcia Faure, Radar Supplement, Página 12, 2012
Dear Cy,
You painted a beautiful series the year I was born… it just took me twenty eight years to find it. You painted a battle and here there were battles, you painted dirtied whites and I awoke this morning with an image of those dirty whites that captivated my attention on Half Moon Island. I awoke with the understanding that it was your work guiding (directing) my lens, in the fullness of Antarctica, towards a stained white; dirtied and roughed by lichen, penguins, and time itself. In essence, your dirtied paintings are an homage to painting itself: to the dirt that marks our passing through this world, doing, undoing, covering, writing…
Cy, how powerful. Standing before your work I am in awe and I wonder: what are you covering when you cover to uncover? What are you drawing while you write? What are you continuing in a painting that follows another? You clearly know what you are talking about, but reading you will take me a lifetime.
You know something? One day while visiting the Museum of Philidelphia I found your series “Fifty Days at Illiam”. I entered the room and for many long hours was not able to leave... I simply could not leave. I would look at your ten paintings one by one, stop, leave, and need to return as if captured by a spell. Your pieces, white, dirtied, written, painted, scribbled and stripped… drew me in, made me wish I could live inside. I thought of the movie “The Purple Rose of Cairo”… but instead of the actor emerging towards me from the screen, I wanted to be able to enter into that space of freedom, of salsa blanca, and spend the whole afternoon there. It would be like an infinite space of games, without rhyme or reason… only that day, there was one of those typical security guards watching me with a when-are-you-leaving-this-is-my-job kind of face.
Time passes, I buy books and books of your work, I visit you whenever I can, and I remember the afternoon I fell in love in Philadelphia… I look through your whites and simply cannot understand that there is nothing to understand.
My dear Cy, I have a question: Painting—is it a state of being?
Ever yours,
Margarita