Luisa Pita
Art Gallery

Of Daggers and Weeping

“The miracle of life only needs time and sensitivity to understand it. And to see it. The vineyard brings to light a map that exhumes a thousand sensations. It has the advantage that its vital space is cyclical and can be shown, complete, in a year. The vine can last more than a hundred years, but it opens up naked every season. It dies in autumn of sadness a few weeks after becoming fruitless, and revives each spring, freshly shaved, when it ceases to be a dishevelled hydra and rounds out its forms in an attempt to return to the beauty of curved lines, that which opens up to new time…

Now, in these weeks, the vine is going through the puberty of the annual cycle. The sharp bicorne dagger has already done its silent work. Whack. It did not close it equally, nor at the same time. The cuts don’t kill, they only flatten the uncontrolled growth…

Thumbs and canes weep milky, transparent sighs, which arouse the grief of the vine grower. Why do the vines weep? More than weeping, it is the humid, carnal wind that bounces from the roots to the sky and when it wants to continue climbing, it does not find a body and falls, ripe, to mother earth…

I have read that there are vines that weep more than four litres. I don’t know who has measured it. But I do know that the mark of the puddle remains for many days stuck next to the trunk and that the shadow scratches towards the bottom, seeking to decipher the mystery that makes things grow. That is the miracle… The vine cries with laughter when it discovers that everything that grows has a measure and when it adjusts and is hydrated by the liquid sun, that is beauty”.

Caledonio Pérez.
La Opinión, El Correo de Zamora. 

Of Daggers and Weeping is a proposal inspired by the miracle of the life of the vines and above all by the pruning of the vineyard, which is the most intimate contact between man and nature.

Pruning a vineyard requires knowing it, but above all, loving it.
Pruning is to the vineyard what an architect is to a new building.

This is the miracle, the cry that pushes a new cycle with splendour before the dagger of the pruner, in his eagerness to prevent ageing, control growth, obtain more select trunks and ensure quality. Sometimes, you see hands digging in the soil and searching for that energy that only grows below, impenitent and vigorous.

Pierre Louis Geldenhuys starts from the metaphorical concept of “living space” as a central element to dominate the world, but focuses on an optimistic view of the world in the face of the intrusiveness of the fully-fledged human being to dispose and expand his area of influence without limits and the weeping of nature due to environmental devastation.

Of Daggers and Weepin is an exhibition of ten conceptual and intervened works, with a message that calls our attention to the care of the planet in the face of its poor health.

The sea, the air, the earth and the fire; the fauna and the flora; the sun, the moon, the whole Universe and the human being give off a breath of hope and are transformed and filled with vines, leaves, flowers and fruits every spring at the same time as they transmit a warning signal.

We humans tend to think that we know everything and that we can control, shape and dominate or even manipulate nature and its mechanisms in order to maximise its performance. But deep down, we know nothing.