LA NATURALEZA QUE RESCATA EL TIEMPO EN UN INSTANTE

artistas –nadie como aquellos que han seguido el camino de Nils-Udo– han contribuido a mostrar hasta qué punto la primera es cada vez más un producto de la segunda. Y particulari- zar sus geografías significa evocar el amplio territorio de la mística que encuentra en sus des- plazamientos, desde un axis munditan real como imaginario, que sería su Baviera natal, centro cardinal de sus experiencias –el gigantesco Nidode Bundesgartenschau, en Munich, fechado en 2005, uno de sus últimos proyectos en la naturaleza, no sólo rompe los límites de la escala humana, recuperando la grandiosidad de los earthworksmás clásicos, sino que, además de remitirnos a lo natural, al origen primero del hombre, incide en lo efímero como valor hierofá- nico que se superpone a la idea de perdurabilidad–, hasta cruzar la dimensión simbólica de los cuatro viejos elementos fundadores del cosmos, en el agua y la tierra, en el aire y el fuego, que unen sus trabajos en los cinco continentes, desde el Mar Egeo al Mar del Norte o al Báltico, desde el Océano Índico al Atlántico o desde el Mar de las Antillas al Océano Pacífico, fun- diendo naturalezas del tiempo instantáneo en lugares tan dispares de la India o Australia, Japón, Canadá, Francia y Estados Unidos, Grecia y Gran Bretaña, la Martinica o las Islas Reunión… Y, por supuesto, en lugares de España. Sus actuaciones en las Islas Canarias refuerzan esa idea de sublimar la congelación de un tiempo cíclico que recupera el presente como totalidad, en la tinerfeña rompiente de la Isla del Infierno, haciendo flotar flores rojas en el agua, arrancando la representación de los nenúfares del Monet de Giverny para perturbar el valor de lo real en un all-roundno menos real. Actuaciones que han tenido un colofón en la serie Lanzarote, donde Nils-Udo retrata el continuumde la geografía climatológica y su terrio- torio volcánico como el grandioso medidor del tiempo mítico, semejante al que T. S. Eliot relató en su The Waste Land, dando vida a la luz y al viento, al fulgor del agua o a la voz del trueno, donde las ninfas se habían marchado y la ciudad irreal ya no tenía agua sino sólo roca…

Octavio Paz decía que la naturaleza no era ni una substancia ni una cosa, era simple- mente un mensaje, y cuando el hombre la humanizaba, en realidad le estaba dando sentido, tal vez la convertía en un lenguaje, pero, en su oposición con la cultura, se encontraba inevi- tablemente con el mito, cuya relación con el tiempo era peculiar: un tiempo que volvía sobre sí mismo, porque lo que pasó está pasando ahora y volverá a pasar8. Entonces el instante de Friedrich W. J. von Schelling podría ser ya suficiente para capturar el instante perpetuo, el mismo que el ojo profundo de Nils-Udo sitúa en nuestra percepción cuando fragmenta la mirada para apropiarse justamente de un trozo de naturaleza, cuya escenografía es todas las naturalezas posibles, el cuadro más real que nadie pudiera imaginar, sometido al tan citado continuumque necesitaba Robert Morris para que el tiempo y el espacio se fundie- sen en una unidad que sintiésemos como una experiencia real, tocable, visible, sonora e incluso llena de olores y de sabores.

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NOTAS

1 Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1993.

2 Friedrich W. J. von Schelling, La relación del arte con la naturaleza, Madrid, Sarpe, 1985, pp. 71-72. 3 Jan Patöcka, L´art et le temps, París, P.O.L., 1990, p. 31.

4 Étienne de Condillac,Lógica y extracto razonado del tratado de las sensaciones, Buenos Aires, Aguilar, 1975.

5 Id., p. 35.

6 Mircea Eliade, La sacré et le profane, París, Gallimard, 1965, p. 35.

7 John Beardsley, «Vers une nouvelle culture de la nature?», en Liliana Albertazzi (ed.), Différents Natures. Visions de l´art contemporain, París, Lindau, 1993, p. 63.

8 Octavio Paz, Levi-Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo, Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1993, pp. 48, 56 y 121.

In the prevailing atmosphere of the dilution of genres in art, no definition is needed to frame actions involving nature when it becomes the subject and object of such a comprehensive aesthetic order as the one that, for over thirty years, has been feeding Nils-Udo’s vision. An all- encompassing vision that bursts the limits of the old painter who thinks he can overcome the idea of representation of the Romantic landscape tradition –even if he does so from within the very heart of a Romanticism that sublimates the ego as the privileged state of the soul– by cul- turally constructing nature as a hierophanic cosmos of the ancients or in the manner of the Japanese fukei, whose perception is written with the ideograms for wind and sight. And beyond what that ego represented in a state of sublimation and the unprejudiced Kantian ide- alism that glimpsed the formal beauty of the most impressive landscape in the broad field of art, as a painting élargie–since he is, above all, a landscape painter, even when he has left rep- resentation behind–, Nils-Udo, who, strangely enough, had given up traditional painting in 1972 –though he has taken up it again in recent times in returning to the possibilities of a blank canvas–, places us in the stream where it is possible to exercise artistic awareness from a renewed all-round perspective: the individual who lives art ceases to be an exterior subject and installs himself inside the work or is forced to become part of it, roams about in it, embraces it and dimensions it in the present continuousas Robert Morris1sought to –where it was impos- sible to experience space outside of real time– in order to construct a comprehensive work, a picture you could actually walk through, in which nature is lived and becomes flesh and where the individual ritualises the landscape through the physicality of the five senses, as their inter- ventions enable us to touch the water or the grass, the rocks and the flowers, perceive the smell of the countryside, savour the perfume of the trees and the wind, listen to the singing of the birds and imagine the music of Mahler or the flowing of a river and extend our gaze to the climatologic vision of the instant that succeeds in capturing time in order to freeze it. And the landscape is born, as a garden of paradise or as an altar of water, as a coloured tower or as a floating island of a thousand daffodils, as a mountain shot through with multicoloured petals or as a cold white glacier, as a forest whose trees sway in the storm or as the beach melting the infinite sight of the dusk, as the volcano attempting to spit out red lava or as a mountain slope of fire, as a cliff tamed by vegetation or as an open stretch of green countryside scattering flow- ers and seeds, bamboos or rhododendrons, apple trees and fallen branches of slight pines which, sometimes, are felt as gigantic nests of an old, mythological fauna of gigantic animals… From the myths of nature to the pantheistic vision of Spinoza, who made nature transcend like a feeling of the soul, Nils-Udo’s time is the time of a renewed interpretation of the calm

Nature rescuing time in an instant X. Antón Castro*

* Director of the Cervantes Institute, Milan, Professor of History of Art, Pontevedra Art University, Critic of Art and independent curator.

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X. ANTÓN CASTRO

beauty of Schelling who finds in art its instantaneous eternity. For the Romantic philosopher, every shoot of nature has just one instant of full and true beauty, and art, as the essence of that instant, rescues it from time: makes it appear in its pure being, in the eternity of its living2. To freeze time is to transform the idea of nature as lived, but reversible, culture and to fix it in the instant implies stopping time to analyse it and perhaps to offer it up as the ideal image of a world accepted as a philosophy for existing. But the freezing occurs in the documentary image –the photograph– which paralyses perception at the exact point desired by the artist who, in every case, goes beyond Romantic time which sublimates the empathetic ego of the pantheistic vision of nature. And there emerges the time of reason and analysis, so noticeably present, even in its most poetic dimension, in the work of Nils-Udo, who fragments the atmosphere of living and passes through it, forces us to be present at the transformation of the former in the passage of light or in the flow of the seasons, making use of peculiar literary figures, where synaesthesia, with the dislocated mutation of images –we can think of the white and red snow or its fruits to arouse sensations in nature of colour, where the leaves and the pollen, the petals, the seeds, the grass and the flowers… reinforce the human cultural construction of the landscape like an immense poem– place man in a constant movement (here is the evocation of Morris’s present continuous) that merges times and spaces: the suc- cession of reality. Without it there would be no awareness of change, because human life appears defined by the continuous imminence of time. Fixing the image in the time of the instant means alluding to its historicity, the same historicity that Jan Patöcka presents essen- tially as creating the new3. In the analysis, not only the singular sites, but also the materials play a fundamental part: both are nature, but their merger generates a new way of perceiving it and, therefore, a concept that transforms it, through a process of aesthetisation that touches the real world, to which we all appeal. That world is ours, the world of the landscapes that Nils-Udo –moreover–, from Romanticism’s other shore, in the realm of logical reason –and I place myself within the analytic philosophy of Étienne de Condillac, at the antipodes of Schelling’s, although an exquisite complement to it– perceives also as a process which we would today ascribe to a deconstructionism of nature: decomposing only to recompose by means of analysis and systematisation, observing what it shows us4. What does it show us? Condillac is quite clear about this: it shows us how to introduce order into the faculty of think- ing, as our mistakes –he says– begin when we stop perceiving it or feeling it. Only it has cre- ated a system that leads us to knowledge and «we have no choice but to observe what it shows us…»5. From this perspective, Nils-Udo’s projects in nature, and even his photographs and his most recent paintings, which succeed in reinventing the cyclic time of his projects, paralysing the instant in a systematised idea of what we understand as representation, under- line, however, the feeling of essential relationships between the natural geographies of his searches and culture. Relationships that would reconvert homogeneous spaces into hiero- phanies of heterogeneity, in other words, converting chaos into cosmos, uninhabited and unknown space into a human dwelling place protected by any sacral –in the most secular sense of the word– presence or manifestation by a process of aesthetic cosmisation, as con- ceived through the eyes of Mircea Eliade6–for whom this process always implies a consecra- tion or refoundation–, among the first settlers, or reformulating the potential between nature and culture, since we could agree with John Beardsley7that no-one like artists –no-one like those who have followed Nils-Udo’s path– has contributed more to showing to what extent the former is more and more a product of the latter. And to particularise its geographies means evoking the extensive territory of the mysticism he finds in his movements, from an axis

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