June 5 - July 13, 2008
Here it's Peace
San Diego Art Institute

Poems by Ivan Sigg

Translation: Gabrielle Kauffmann

To write these lines
I look at your work
Overcome, overwhelmed
They encompass me

These lines do not refer directly to certain pieces. They operate autonomously, letting you select or neglect, as you please.

Color
Paint their anguish?
Paint one’s anguish?
Paint tenderness?
Paint one’s doubts? A temptation?
Paint? Paint!

Transparency of a portrait
An image swept by time
Like the bark of a face
Water, wind, fire, and desolation
Scatter it, erase it
Which words to hold it back?

Vacant stares
Cut out portraits
Or flattened sadness?
Action-painting or thought-writing?
To read the words is to miss the painting
Calling forth a familiar image

Peace here, war there
Here is the child’s grave gaze
There the Indian’s engraved gaze
Here the spectator’s attentive stare
There, the painter’s, steeped in duality
All in the same present that paints us

Eyes expand
Through landscapes that hold no desires
Through the plane vying with the cloud for beauty
Through the death that gestates in its hold
Through the gut of a painting
Through the painter’s fertility

Feet in the ocean, head in the desert
Michèle digitizes new bodies
Pixelises the emergence of being
Skims magnetic resonances
Vectorises caresses and frictions
And then smoothes out her eruptive effusions

Luminous images
The painter’s eye
a thermal camera
Her hand, a hostess of finishing,
Quivers beings of photonic lava
Into incandescent affinities

White light
Backlit photon fusions
Etches of happy embers
Neither beginning nor ending
No longer bordered between interior and exterior
Intransient beauty

Humanity is a flame between sunshine and magma
Bodies of sand disintegrating through conflicts
The fluidity and resilience of glass bodies melding into joy
Mankind is a burn of life
In a desert of ignorance without eyes, nose or ears
Thought is a drop of metal creating stillness

An aura of empathy unites them
Their eyes gape at the world
Their pupils dilate their bodies
Absorbed in the moment
In the generous light of day
The juice of being flows through them

Universal energy
See them notice each other
See them discover each other
From the same elements they are made, the same void
See them enter into contact
Surprised and bewildered

Ivan Sigg III 25 08