I.

In The Origin of the Work of Art (1938), Heidegger interpreted the worn boots in Van Gogh’s painting. In them… the fatigue of the laborious steps is captured… the tenacity of the slow march is preserved… the moisture and saturation of the ground is deposited… the silent call of the earth vibrates… In the eyes and in the words of the interpreter, we are given a pair of boots inscribed in a vital network of paths, land, walks, fatigue, efforts, desires… a belonging to a dramatic and hidden everyday life that is now revealed to us. All that remains of this network of relationships are two boots and their openness to a gaze that discovers the world and the life that made them what they were. Heidegger gives us what remains on the canvas, what is captured, held, deposited, still alive.

In the face of the very contemporary assertion that things are always new, as if they came from nowhere, that they disappear silently before the arrival of new things that will not tell us their origins, their dramas or their affiliations, Heidegger’s gaze reminds us of the need to listen to the echoes that experiences and landscapes have left in objects, objects that needed to be lived, a life that was made by doing so many things, being made in friction and relationships.

II.

We feel humility and respect when things are revealed: what struggles, what voices, what intimate stories. Everything breathes the silent dignity of what deserves to be told and heard. As in the paintings of Adrián Jorques, where the signs of time become symbolic through the layers, suggesting a life behind each thing, an inner life ready to manifest.

We know that if we do not have the time to speak and to listen, to let things tell us their things, we lose the gravity, the tenderness and the fragility that make us who we are. The pondus of Saint Augustine, without which we fade. Our accelerated gaze flees, in truth, from ourselves, from our participation in the life that calls us. Without relationship there is no identity, we hold, like Hamlet the skull in the last act of the tragedy, only the increasingly blurred image of ourselves. There is no story, no symbol, no mystery to dwell in. Nor does it inhabit us. No revelation. No boots.

III.

We are grateful to art for revealing to us hidden stories and at the same time leaving us in the mystery of the same things, of ourselves. If our gaze is constant and respectful, the canvas reveals itself, and strangely we feel that until then we had only seen a simple apron, a duster, a cover, without reaching what it hid; now we see, now the painting manifests itself, but we also notice, with a somewhat uncomfortable sense of strangeness, that we are the ones who discover ourselves, that apron, duster, also covered us. This beginning of modesty and respect before the revelation of things, of ourselves, of our relationship with them, is perhaps the sign of a vita nuova. Art cannot save us, but like Virgil leading Dante out of hell, it tells us: Look!

IV.

Other speeds, other eyes. Other spaces to contemplate. I remembered what happens to me when I discover a vast landscape through the window of a train: when I look down at what is close and fast, an elusive and shapeless mass rushes up, a sinkhole of unstable colours: Wanting to see what is immediate and close, allowing oneself to be possessed by excessive speed, leads to a paradoxical confusion that makes one dizzy; on the other hand, looking up at the horizons hanging above the window gives me back the gift of the landscape, the clarity of the great lines that come together, the presence of colours and nuances, the time covered with permanence in which the soul can rest. . I recover in the slowness and in the expanded spaces of revelation.

Painting, art, another window on the wagon of life.

José Manuel Mora-Fandos

Complutense University of Madrid