Paint over your used canvas

If it is by nature, because of divine purposes or just another unwished consequence of capitalism, I actually don't know, but we humans are accumulators par excellence. We are surrounded by the culture of 'retain'. Digitally programmed to save it all. Even understanding the pointlessness of preserving a whole arsenal of useless things, we tend to think we might need some of it later on, and we keep them all. There is something awfully unhealthy in the fact that we need to retain everything we touch. As if having filled drawers and overflowing files could, ultimately, save us.

OK.

'Ephemeron, from the Greek, means something that last no more than a day (epi: on, for, hemera: day)'.

I've been lately taking special notice of a whole unpriced concept of art: the ephemeral art. Snow, ice and sand sculptures, body art, fireworks, gardening, magic fountains, graffiti, are all examples of artistic expressions that are not meant to last. Not that it is a groundbreaking brand new thing we have never heard of before, just think yourself as a child. I was used to build sand forts, and I should admit I still enjoy spending hours of patience and endurance to create useless sand barriers which will vainly fight against the fierce waves. Tons of hours spent that go down the drain. So what?

There is an explicit call to the idea of the transitory impermanence of life, something that as a rule, we humans avoid dealing with. It is to be found a strong relationship between the human being and the passage of time in the fleeting integrity of the structural components of those works of art. This is it, and it is now: later, probably it won't be anymore, and that's the whole point.

Figuring up our life stages as paintworks: we need to start painting over our used canvas! There is an urgent appeal to jettison the cursed habit of saving them all. It sounds so tough, after so much effort, thinking of letting our work go. And yes, I know, it has never been easy to experience, deeply, the devastating dispensability of being. But actually there is no need to throw them away. We just have to start over again, reuse them, paint over them.

Every brushstroke incorporates all the ones I made before. I mean: everything that I was and could not be brought me to this present place. The actual painting takes in everything that makes me be what I am. The actual painting includes somehow all the previous ones. It applies to relations, studies, decisions, failures: how many times we have changed course does not matter but for the purposes of what we are in the exact moment of now. Working on an only canvas allows us to step back and ask ourselves why. It helps us focus, clear out. Staying away from the damn habit of trying to understand it all. It helps especially to let go.

Social media as Snapchat or the recent update of Instagram moves in that direction, offering the chance to create a self-destroying message, placing first its content over its relevance in time. It makes me kind of comfortable and confident about the way the world is moving on now. It's time to stop feeding our fragile memories with poisonous chat histories and souvenirs' trunks, epic collections, which ironically stagnates us in a nostalgic whirlwind, no exit, no forward. Memories are an inevitable part of our lives, they bring almost bodily sensations (sometimes with uncanny acuteness) but come on, nothing can substitute a real experience, at no time. It avails me nothing to remember if I can't feel your skin in the end. Therefore no more brand new canvasses to buy, just the old and used ones to bring back. Provided, of course, we never run out of color and paint supplies.