A December night at the museum

A skyscraper. Dense, synthetic, symmetrical.
Lines. I saw her drawing lines.
I saw that happening, in real time! She was standing right in front of me. A little bit to the left, to be completely fair, in a wide, tall room, guarded by of Popes a pair. Immediately, as soon as I saw them, all I could think about was the riddle with one of the guardians of a door, bridge or whatever always lying and the other always telling the truth.
She stopped in front of a door, grabbed a sketchbook with a concrete (un)coloured cover, opened it to its third page and started computing her seemingly random strokes, that over time excavated a face from the chalk, a column in a distant country holding the memories of those features long forgotten by trees and clouds.
I can see one of the identical floors, in a loop, from my point of view. Does she understand things with no lines?
I have never seen clouds like that. Made from destruction, to be forgotten. Memories of dust don’t find enough breaths and whiffs in fragile minds to know freedom and be winnowed eternally from their groves.
On the floor, from my perspective, there are no lines. Does she even understand lines? Was that a Chinese room?
The leverage of colours turn the untimely clock counterclockwise. Blue goes down, blue goes up; red and its enemy, yellow, dance around each other, ready to find a weak spot in each other’s guard and lunge forward for the kill.
Stabbed and pierced rests the interrupted black diagonal, line, axis, hinge or pivot.
A distant music streams from the next room. Is it a trick?
Like these lines, in front of my mind spinning so vague and far, all parallel, all vibrating, noise on the horizon of a perfectly ordered epoxy beach exploring the night.
Yells of rage, cracked wood logs, absent.
It’s a metaphor for a circuit board, out a children’s park’s map.
The blue square is the king, every path leading to it. Water, giver of it, drinker of it, essence of it.
Where there was one, now the number has doubled. Echo.
There will be war. But not here, not now. We are left with a cloud of metallic tasting tension, ridiculed by old British catchy military marches.
Asymmetry shown as asymmetric colours. Where does the judge takes his judgment from? What will he contemplate before drawing the winning lotto balls from his plastic spherical head?
Of martyrs and stares. Was it ever a choice?
The cross is gravity for some. No, they are not asteroids. They run fast, and burn spectacularly. Shooting stars, maybe dissolving tailed comets. The march becomes rock music. A gray trousered doll stares through her impeccable colour mask at an artwork about democracy and equality. She moves, and a black glassed guard takes over her staring role, with different interest and curiosity.
A dark blue tunnel, leading to a screening room. Two people sitting on cubes, a standing man – his left shoulder on the left side of the door frame. No one dares getting closer.
A man arrives, with two women following him, chatting. He perceives the sacrality of the scene before them, and with a rapid “ssssssh!” suggests them to join the prayer of silence.
Lips on another canvas, eternally repeating, as we promise to each other our kisses to be. Lips making a skyline in a city surrendered to the night.
On the screen there’s a child.
I don’t really care anymore about my position in the room. People can flow around me. Space is less ordered and more fluid in this world. I try to look outside the window, but in the darkness I can only see raindrops diagonally cutting the glass and sparse white spotlights. There’s a volcano in this room, or so the huge slab of metal is presenting itself; surrounded by destruction, or building blocks for a creation. I’m standing on a grate, dark. I wouldn’t want to drop my pen in it. I’ll move from this wastelands, this exploded silence.
The child on the screen is in a green room. On my second passage outside the room I read that he’s deaf and from Syria. He makes anomalous noises, unintelligible.
Isolated houses, in an unidentifiable hour of the day, in a meaningless space.
The conflict between the unsaid and the detail.
How much significance does the soil where a house grows carry?
Motion. People are shuffling fast, many with a mobile in their hands. A couple is dancing, like fluidly malfunctioning machinery, in front of a long artwork with human figures over it.
A man on the other side of the room is recording them.
Is this exhibitionism, disturbing the others’ experience? Art? Is this a canvas for the videomakers and the sketchers to make new art? Is this anything at all? Potentially, the most polite synchronized seizure in the colour.
Investigation on colour.
War, sex, technology. Is there any vision in addressing evident limits?
Transcended still lifes, portraits. I always search for the eyes of those immortal faces. I’ll try to describe the look of the ones in the room.
Eyes are absent. The painting is of a city I’ve been to.
Tired.
Perplexed, or proud. The birds.
Enquiring.
Annoyed.
Valleys, rusty iron mines.
Satisfied.
Annoyed.
Absent.
Absent.
Absent.
Absent.
Over all these paintings there’s a glass coating where I can see my eyes. Or, better, I should see them, but the light – or these artworks – makes it possible for me only to see the shadow of myself. The shadow or a shadow? Has a man one shadow for every mood and light or the creature following us is always the same?
Eyes of toys.
Absent. There’s a pair of eyes, but they have abandoned the perception of this reality, and float in their orbits interrogating different lights.
Raindrops, petals.
Slightly surprised.
Relaxed, peaceful.
Absent, but there are two beans close to each other who somehow resemble a pair of eyes. What kind of look could animate a pair of beans?
Absent.
Superb, dramatic, dreamy.
Desperate, praying – for a miracle, asking for forgiveness.
Forgiving.
Closed, in a dream.
Hopeful.
I enter the next room. The first name of and artwork that I can read on the wall to my left is “Meditation (with eyes open)”. There’s a guide, as in something secretly showing me the way around. And there’s a blonde girl guiding a guy, fully dressed in back but for two white stripes on his trousers, through the lines of a Mondrian. Surrealism is a synonym for displacement. Controlled chaotic displacement.
The feeling of an insignificant human existence. The child in the green room moves his arms.
Faces, staring at us. Demons from the Eastern lands, spirits from the desert.
Broken childhood dreams, ascended into nightmares. Is humanity beyond the shape?
If so, why do the people see broken lines as the loss of humanity? As if we were plain, linear, filled and filtered, ordered.
The more they try to represent inhumanity,c the harder they renounce to the canons, rejecting “reality”, the more clearly I see people, the artists becoming immersed in the same reality I can observe.
When I entered the shop I felt overwhelmed.
Ideas, places, ways of being, ways of expressing oneself and inner worlds, ways of exposing ethereal hidden muteness.
I had to talk. My mind flew back to her.
Maybe expression inspired by the visual hadn’t to be a luxury reserved to visual spirits.

Maybe that world could be converted into words.

A room full of colours. A guy resembling an hawk, staring. From lines, to colours, to lines. Lines immersed in chromatic flatness, borders between peaceful, uninterested Nations – but still, change and motion animate the room.
A seed, golden, extends itself to become an afterlifeless sarcophagus. Blood on its walls as a request, as a fortune teller’s dream and obsession, self projecting hoping to see and create self fulfilling prophecies, to put its own destiny in a form where the pressure of a fingertip could leave an elliptic furrow. Clay, soil for seeds.
The eye room again. This time I’ll try to catch the look in the eyes of the people shuffled around the room.
Happy.
Inquisitive, curious.
Careful.
Menacing.
Focused.
Annoyed.
Shy.
Looking away – but not simply to another area.
Captured.
Intense.
Astounded.
Enraptured.
Pensive.
Excited.
Bored. A mother and her daughter.
Weaving. A glassed peacock girl inquisitively scans postcards.
Two people going in different directions on the escalator greet each other.
Klee’s puppets dance, drunken.
There’s torment on these walls. I can feel people’s discomfort. Once again, I cross the border towards another room-realm.
On the wall “this took contains works that some visitors might find upsetting”.
Those eyes are lost. Too much horror has driven them to be mere shape perceivers, colour suggesters. The links and implications willfully ignored.
Two women hanging, a diaphanous unpainted man screaming. Two girls in front of the frame.
One is standing at the screen of her mobile, texting someone. The other, suspended in a caramel fluffy coat with a yellow scarf, points at the rectangle and says “Oh, this is disturbing”.
This isn’t enough to capture the first girl’s attention from her device – her eyes still on the illuminated rectangle she mumbles “Hm, that’s better”, and they walk away.
A room of portraits, and self portraits. What really caught my eye in this room are the hands of those figures.
The eyes, like the sounds of the child, pretend to be human, and appear to be so to a distracted onlooker, but they hang like geometric splashes on the nose, without anything up say or any coherent expression to push through others’ corneas. They are masks, actors, shapes, vessels, tissues, cells, molecules, strings, canvas strings. They are, however, not eyes.
The hands are hanging and hovering, incapable of holding anything. Distended, contorted into a relaxed fist, supporting wrists or elbows, they simply close a circle passing through the spirited, shocked eyes.
Those hands, like those eyes, have literally, and symbolically, lost their grip on reality. Everything’s ready to slip away, to flicker into a muddy, dark, bottomless pond.
A veiled girl stares at two naked women, posing in aggressive, challenging stances.
It’s a poetic vision.
A perversion of classicism. Death and sickness enter those golden, out of time Arcadias. What is born, from the death of perfection? Reality, some might say.
The theme of the room is faith.
“The gods of pain and terror made them true believers”, one might easily say. But faith is the act of trusting an idea even without any real, rational proof. The condition, possibly, is even stronger than an even without.
But I’m not a big expert on the matter.
With the tragic given as proof, it’s not a matter of believing or faith anymore.
It’s a matter of surviving.
“Does God speak to you?”
“Not personally”
A tribalistic crescendo.
Tsafendas, in South Africa.
A totem of lights and distant voices.
A guard is holding a door open, trying to talk to a voice on the other side. He is trying to reassure the voice, in some language which I don’t recognize.
The voice repeats the same word over and over. At first it sounds like “broccoli”, then with some efforts, the voice manages to utter a “properly”.

Stuff is the king in this new land.
Material, shape, function are all perverted.
Like the eyes of before, I recognize the object but I am unable to find their essence, soul, identity, scope or meaning. This complicates everything.
Unlike eyes, objects ARE their shape, or their function.
I can’t interact with those, so there is no way for me of knowing about their actions; therefore I’m left with form, in the paradoxical position of recognizing them simply through their exteriority, but repudiating the same as wrong. Had it been wrong how could have I recognized the object? There must be something subtle, making them uncanny, impossible. A lost third essence. What am I missing?
There is no frenesy. People walk slowly. Hundreds of people, and everything is so quiet. I am leaving. The bus will leave this city in three hours.
Highly reflective vinyl square tiles cover a ramp; on the other side raucous wooden stairs.
I am out. Bluish ice blocks are melting away in the courtyard facing the entrance, painting the slope towards the river with a darker hue.
People are playing with the amorphous shapes, touching them, hugging them, sitting on them. A couple is taking a selfie while licking one of the largest of those monuments to transiency. “That’s ridiculous…and disgusting” someone comments.
In an underground passage an old man is playing, with virtuoso skills, a classical piece on his violin.
We all seem too distracted to care.
Only a giant girl, in a vaporous red coat slows down, slightly, her pace, and stares with soul-disarming green eyes in the direction of the musician, who lost in his notes with closed eyes returns the favour to us, and does not seem to notice anything about his surroundings.