ArsGravis
Sobre ArsGravis (2006) About the reasons and purpose of this website. Raimon Arola and Lluïsa Vert https://www.arsgravis.com[1]
Description
Table of contents The framework: ART AND SYMBOL[2] The title: ARSGRAVIS, giving body to the invisible[3] The proposal: Reflections on the confluence between art and symbol[4] Brief resume of Raimon Arola and Lluïsa Vert[5] Collaborators[6] Some texts by Louis Cattiaux that define the intimate purpose of Arsgravis[7] Explanation of Arsgravis (video)[8]
The framework: ART AND SYMBOL
"I've had the opportunity to teach a course dedicated to the study of symbols for over 30 years at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona[9] . It's a privilege that I can't help but share on this website, which is now presented in a new format. To do so, I have collaborated with Lluïsa Vert." Raimon Arola
We would like to define the study of symbology at the University based on three premises:
We have moved away from any confessional and religious framework. We have distanced ourselves from possible syncretistic abuses of certain esoteric and spiritualist media. We have also moved away from scientific obsessions that seek to explain an experience through erudition.
The texts, rituals, and, above all, the symbols transmitted by the various spiritual traditions are the foundation of this website. We have relied on academic rigor to study the symbols of the various spiritual traditions, following the path opened in the most advanced universities of the West, primarily by the Eranos Circle and essayists of the traditionalist school who followed René Guénon. We have also opened a section dedicated to the figure of Louis Cattiaux, an author very close to us but whose work remains largely unknown.
We have focused primarily on artistic creation, so that art is read as a practice of the transcendent and symbol as a transcendence that can be recognized in forms. For this reason, we have also featured poets and painters not framed by any tradition, but whose art has kept the life of the spirit alive. Therefore, the various articles we present reflect forms from very different sources. On the ArsGravis website, we are not unaware of African statues, Islamic ornaments, Egyptian frescoes or Byzantine icons, oriental calligraphy, classical statues, or abstract painting. Nor are we unassuming images, such as engravings from alchemical or magical books, nor the contributions offered by new technologies for observing nature. Each of these examples—without a doubt?—contains symbolic and artistic wisdom.
The title: ARSGRAVIS, giving body to the invisible
ArsGravis or "grave art," in the sense of "profound, noble, important, transcendent...", but also and basically, an art "of weight," or more precisely, an art that "gives weight" to the subtle and invisible. Emmanuel d'Hooghvorst wrote in relation to this Art (with a capital A): "Giving body and measure to immensity is the mystery of pure Art." The symbolic artist is the one who unites heaven and earth, who includes the infinite in the finite in his work, who coagulates the dispersed, who fixes the volatile.
When art is "serious," the link with universal symbols is established naturally, effortlessly, because then the immensity of creation is expressed in the particular, as Henry Corbin explains when he distinguishes between symbol and allegory:
"The symbol is not an artificially constructed sign; it emerges spontaneously in the soul to announce something that cannot be expressed in any other way. It is the only expression of what is symbolized as a reality that makes itself transparent to the soul, yet transcends all expression."
This serious art is the mirror in which men contemplate themselves and come to see their interiority, to know their mystery; thus, the invisible becomes visible. Art with weight is, in the words of Louis Cattiaux, "like the illumination that appears after the unraveling of inner chaos and that is achieved in solitary meditation. It is like the awakening of the secret and all-powerful being that slumbers within each of us."
The proposal: Reflections on the confluence between art and symbol
The ability of modern man to access different cultures, to compare them, and to appreciate their differences and also their convergences is a strictly historical fact that leads us to understand that there are levels of reality beyond change, that is, that they are ahistorical.
Two of these levels, close to what the ancients called "the sacred," will be the subject of our study: artistic creation and the transcendent meaning of symbols.
Just as art requires the transcendence of symbols to unite its disparate contents, symbols require art to be enlivened in their experience. Transcendence and experience are two complementary aspects of the human spirit that have developed in parallel throughout the evolution of civilizations. The poet, the painter, the architect, when creating, actualize symbols and give them new life. Without this praxis, the possibility of understanding disappears, and with it, the possibility of connecting to the sacred. The aesthetic experience has served and will serve to put into practice what is written in the sacred books and proclaimed in the various rites.
We understand a symbol as the reflection of the unintelligible in the intelligible. The symbol combines the sacred and the profane, for it participates in the original light and manifests it in the form of images of the world. Symbols are the bridges that, across the darkness of multiplication, unite men with their mythical origin. Let us remember that the word "symbol" comes from a Greek verb meaning "to unite," and this is precisely its function: to unite heaven with earth, the infinite with the particular, the volatile with the fixed.
Symbolic images are not reference signs with meanings established by human conventions, but rather forms with universal content, alien to historical conventions. In a society like ours, where vision predominates over the other senses, these images might need to inspire more enthusiasm.
Symbolic images can be analyzed as representations of a specific cultural context or as universal images of the collective unconscious. Neither of these considerations is false, but another, perhaps more important, point remains: a symbol can only be understood when it is experienced.
But how can a 21st-century person experience that sacredness that lies at the origin of symbolism? Perhaps he cannot escape history except with history. Therefore, while the content could not be different, since it is universal by definition, the forms must be renewed.
In this sense, it seems relevant that, in the modern world, the experience of the sacred has sometimes taken refuge in aesthetic manifestations, and that the genuine praxis of some of the greatest geniuses has been established as an achievement of spiritual practice. However close we may come to the presuppositions of Romanticism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Abstraction, Surrealism—or whatever name you choose to give it—it is certain that in the creative act and in the resulting aesthetic and dramatic pleasure, a sensory experience is revived. An experience that certainly opens paths to access the sacred content of symbols. When a work ' works ,' that is, fulfills its function, it awakens and moves that secret and most interior part of man.