A trickle of water, Intervals (Grid, 2)

For Cesar Paternosto, geometric language is a prior step to purely spiritual forms and a language very closely related  to music. Reading A Trickle of Water, lntervals (Grid, 2) invite you to take a journey through the construction of Paternosto´s pictorial grammar that allows the viewer to plunge the visu depths of the spatial cadences written between the silence framed between verticals of colour.

In the early years of his career, Paternosto was part of tt informalist movement as a member of the Sí Group, a peric that ended at the close of the 1960s. Towards the mid-sixth his work evolved in the direction of high colour saturatic with clear notes of a pop influence and elemental geometry shapes of a markedly minimalist character. In this way, his work shifted towards an abstraction charged with meanings that in the words of Andrés Dupart was abundant in physic and ideal connotations, a geometry demanding a passage the hidden order of things.

Musical references are continually present in his work, either directly, such as in Staccato (1965), currently in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, or indirectly through the sound they emanate, such as here, in A Trickle of Water, lntervals (Grid, 2).

Paternosto’s work always contains a strong musical component. His perception of abstract language is that it enters directly through the senses and, as music, can penetrate the soul even unknowing the code of its writing. For him, abstract language enters via the senses but cannot be verbalised like music. By eliminating the representation of objects, it is possible to move closer to purely spiritual forms. For him, series are like variations on a theme, based on a generative visual idea that he follows through until it is exhausted. Thus, among others, from the series Hilos de agua, lntervals (1997) we find two other pieces (Vertical I and Vertical III) in the Gallery of Cecilia de Torres in New York that allow us to consolidate A Trickle of Water, lntervals (Crid, 2) as a sound read on the white silences sketched on the surface of the canvas between the iridescent cadences of the water threads that provide the rhythm and melody; image, emptiness, image.

Verticals of chromatic play on the canvas establish a symbolic meaning with colour, visible and tangible as if it were the dispersion of light. The watery transparency of the colour achieved by applying a watercolour pencil suggests a decisive poetic sensation of fragility, but at the same time contradictory to the strength of geometry.

A Trickle of Water, lntervals (Grid, 2) becomes a score of the soul of the landscape, light and space through which the senses walk to listen to the sounds of silence that Paternosto says continue to visit him.

Pilar Giró