The origin of these flowers is automatic drawing, the kind you do on a piece of paper while talking on the phone, Pep Carrió once explained to me. I thought of Kandinsky and his definition: when rest is destroyed, the point moves and gives rise to the line. A line that in this case, responding to its unplanned nature, could have been a solar system, a group of buildings or a dance of monsters. Instead, we find flowers. Pep Carrió, perhaps unconsciously noticing the similarity between a point and certain seeds, draws flowers.
The plane is, from now on, a garden. And the artist who knows freedom – discovered by a young Pep when he was four or five years old: the sky and the earth are blue – chooses to use it with the patience of a gardener. A line forms the edge of a leaf. When he finishes it – only then – does he move on to the next line: root, thorn, insect wing. The infinite line makes no distinction between large and small. Artist and gardener are in agreement at this point: everything is a continuation, a white shadow, of the original dot.
This blue is reassuring, as is the observation that even the movement of water can be captured. It is reassuring, yes, to know that there are those who, when drawing without any plan, choose flowers instead of monsters or a distant sun.
Emily Dickinson, who also focused her gaze on them and on her close friends, the birds, once said: hearing a golden oriole sing / can be a very common thing / and also a miracle (…) So whether it is a mystery / or, on the contrary, it is not, / it is first and foremost within.
Somewhere in Madrid, the telephone rings, as it so often does. Someone answers, picks up a pencil and begins to draw.
María José Ferrada, Santiago de Chile