I’m not Catholic, but sometimes marking the passages of people who were awake and aware, in whatever belief system they lived in, is important.
Pope Francis passed away earlier this week on April 21 at the age of 88 … He was known as the People’s Pope and had an affinity for artists and creative people in general. A bit of trivia: Pope Francis was the first Pope to visit the Venice Biennale and he opened a contemporary art gallery in the Vatican Library.
It is true that in the encounter with art, boundaries become more fluid and the limits of our experience and understanding broaden. Everything seems more open and accessible. We experience the spontaneity of the child filled with imagination and the intuition of the visionary who grasps reality. For the artist is a child — by this I mean no offense — who gives free rein to originality, novelty and creativity, and thus brings into the world something new and unprecedented.
As artists, then, you have the ability to dream new versions of the world, to introduce novelty into history. New versions of the world. That is why (…) you are like visionaries. You are a bit like prophets. You can see things both in depth and from afar, like sentinels who strain their eyes, peering into the horizon and discerning deeper realities. In doing so, you are called to reject the allure of that artificial, skin-deep beauty so popular today and often complicit with economic mechanisms that generate inequality.
And maybe one we most need to hear these days:
Thus there emerges the important and necessary task of artists (…) to create works of art that bear through the language of beauty a sign, a spark of hope and trust where people seem to give in to indifference and ugliness. Architects and painters, sculptors and musicians, filmmakers and writers, photographers and poets, artists of every discipline, are called to make beauty shine, especially where darkness and greyness dominate everyday life; they are custodians of beauty, heralds and witnesses of hope for humanity, as my predecessors have repeated many times. I invite them, therefore, to care for beauty, and beauty will heal the many wounds that mark the heart and soul of the men and women of our times.
Quotes were pulled from:
