Solo exhibition of the artist and curator Conchi Alvarez
This exhibition launches a new series “Watching Life Go By”. Portraits of honorable old people who look at life from the vantage point of advanced age. This allows them to observe what is happening around them with a wisdom that only comes with age and the accumulation of vast amounts of information of the highest quality.
The origins of this series lie in Castromembibre, a small Castilian town of less than a hundred inhabitants, where my ancestors come from and where the majority of the inhabitants are old. Later, people from other places joined in, because, in an aging society like ours, many elderly people seem to be waiting for this meeting with the painter, who almost only has eyes for them whilst she paints and completes this series. Over the years I have observed these lost gazes, sometimes the product of a pleasant introspection, reliving past moments that always seem better. At other times they scrutinize the life around them and pass judgment, usually for themselves, or generously share that wisdom with younger people. In each portrait, there is a genuine attempt to capture the soul of these venerable people. Conchi Alvarez
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LIFE
May the immortal gods reserve for you, Scipio, the glory of prolonging your grandfather’s work! Cato tells that the judges decided to strip the old man of the management of his family estate, as if he were insane, just as we customarily disqualify heads of families who mismanage their affairs. Yet, in his defense, the old man recited from memory the work he was committed to—no less than Oedipus at Colonus, which he had recently written! And he dared to ask the judges if such a quality was befitting a demented elder. He was rightfully acquitted after reciting the stirring tragedy. (From Cicero’s book, “Cato Maior de Senectute Liber”, or “Cato the Elder On Old Age”). The dialogues of this work, between Cato the Elder and the young Scipio and Laelius, encompass the entire tradition of Greek and Roman thought, from Plato to Cicero himself, who speaks through the honorable Cato. Most of the arguments discussed in this work are just as relevant today, if not more so, as evidenced by the numerous self-help books available on aging, as well as the great classical works of world literature: Hermann Hesse’s Eulogy of Old Age, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Simone de Beauvoir’s Old Age, Cheever’s Oh, This Seems Like Paradise, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Soseki’s Kokoro. There are dozens of masterpieces written, filmed, painted, musically composed, or recited, that have stirred the artistic sensibilities of authors, just like this series of paintings gently titled “Watching Life Pass By” by Conchi Álvarez.
“The reason old age is unpleasant does not lie within itself, but in our customs,” Cicero once remarked. A custom of our time is to refer to the group of elderly people as the “Third Age.” Might this label perhaps conceal yet another product of the consumer society, a market brimming with offers, the very foundation of the democratic fundamentalism of the 20th and 21st centuries? Among other choices, it offers the option of selecting a retirement center or a care facility, depending on one’s means, where the elderly interact only among themselves, and the primary concern is to keep them entertained. Is this not fostering a new class of idle individuals, devoted to tourism, dances, and theater, where they merely follow the instructions of the animator? Could it be that such a situation leads to a form of infantilization, reminiscent of the youth sent off to camps and trips? Paradoxically, thanks to these trips, there are people who admire the sea for the first time or spend countless miles watching life pass by. Do they, then, enjoy a well-deserved rest? This is yet another recurring concept that, in reality, does not exist. Will rest for humans only come with death, in the form of eternal rest? It seems that only then can true rest be achieved. As long as a person is not incapacitated, something that could happen even to a young 25-year-old, they can work, to a greater or lesser extent, and always contribute something to their community. Today, is the “Third Age” becoming a class of rentiers devoted to rest and consumption, akin to the idle classes of past centuries, where it was frowned upon to work, and people grew long nails to show they did not lift a finger? In his soliloquy with Laelius, Cato insists that the elderly ought to engage in useful work for the benefit of their community.”
In this exhibition of paintings from Conchi Álvarez’s family album, individuals are depicted in oil at a precise instant, captured in the artwork through the artist’s meticulous examination of family relics and stories. It is from this process that each portrait’s unique narrative emerges, as a fertile beginning or Preambula Fidei (Preliminary Matters of Faith), representing the lived history of each subject. Life, time, occupation, the gratitude—or lack thereof—of old age, and behind it all, the individual person.
In this case, is it the presence of the person that the painter seeks to evoke from each canvas, to elicit, through the chosen gesture or scene, a central point for reflecting on life, on its meaning or meaninglessness?
It is said that the Person is the most noble and mysterious among the beings that inhabit this world. The most noble, because, unlike objects, the person possesses an inner self, which seems to be the source of their own actions, causa sui, something almost divine. “Persona” was, in fact, the mask worn by actors in tragedies to perform before the audience, per sonare. The persona covered the actor’s head, with its front representing the character, while its back was adorned with a wig. In one of his well-known fables, Aesop tells of a fox who entered an actor’s house and, rummaging through his belongings, found a finely crafted mask. After holding it between her paws, she remarked, “a beautiful head, but without brains.”
One might contend that the metonymy of the tragic persona should be reinterpreted as a synecdoche, for the mask is merely a part of the whole, the character or role assumed by the individual. Indeed, a literary tradition, present since classical antiquity, has compared human life to a theatrical performance and the Earth to a stage. Humans live a human life because they play a role, perhaps one written by God; thus, as actors, they must wear that mask which constitutes them as “characters,” a mask they can hardly exchange for another. According to this metaphor, as Gustavo Bueno suggests, humans are persons insofar as they put on a mask, and if they do not remain alienated, they come to identify with their character through it—what some Freudians might call the super-ego.
However, the ultimate question that perhaps all the intimate figures recreated by Conchi Álvarez’s brush in this exhibition might have asked themselves at some point is the titular issue of what the meaning of life would be. This is often regarded as the deepest question in both worldly and academic philosophy, and it is even said that man and woman can be defined as beings capable of questioning the meaning of their existence, of their lives. There are philosophers who devoted nearly their entire body of work to attempting to answer this question, as is the case with Heidegger. The question is typically posed as follows: What is the meaning of life? And there is no shortage of answers, whether religious, moral, or political. One might say, for instance, “Life is the performance of a comedy or tragedy written by a fool,” and so forth. Yet, there are also those who find such answers unsatisfactory and come to doubt the validity of the question itself: Does life have a meaning? “Is not life a meaningless, contradictory idea, since it inevitably ends in death?” These are issues that call for academic philosophical examination, yet they arise as we watch life pass by.
Roberto Ballesteros