Was when I stepped into the Cy Twombly Exhibition in Houston that is part of the Menil Collection, but housed in a separate building next to the Menil. I don’t know why I discovered this gem just now; maybe it was due to the fact that I was not familiar with this artist.
Walking counter-clockwise through the exhibition, I guess I started the tour backwards, but that doesn’t really matter either. I stepped into a light room with white walls and daylight coming from above that was softened through a white fabric that stretched over the entire ceiling. A triptych with cryptic marks, drawings, splashes of bright paint and writings on a mostly white-greyish background covered the entire wall. The caption read “Untitled” (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) and created by Twombly between 1972 and 1994; referencing Orpheus’ trip to the underworld – which I didn’t know at the time.
I hadn’t seen anything like this before. The scale of the entire piece and the ambiguous symbols and letterings in connection with the white light that flooded the entire room had a powerful impact on me. I sat down on the floor and just gave into this delicious feeling that flooded me with such sweetness and intensity, taking it all in, little by little. As my eyes glazed from the left panel to the middle I discovered drawings that looked like boats, crossed out, moving from left to right, a stark black line with some blue concentrated into a circular shape, and then: those bright color splashes on the right panel with some writing. I couldn’t decipher the entire inscription and yet, the parts I could decode, struck me as expressions of what must have been a deeply spiritual and mystical mind in search of answers to the essential questions of life — and a raw, authentic expression of a powerful creative soul.
“How you gaze
Beyond
(on) birth
The birth to a (nation)
…
And yet then on
The other shore
Under the dark gaze
Sun in your eyes
You were there
The other side
The other dawn
The other birth
Yet there you were.
In the vast time
Drop by drop.”
