The last sentence he published, he said, translating from Catalan: “Where there is more light than necessary, all is darkness.” It seems like a simple thought caught on the fly, like someone catching a fly. Xavier Rubert de Ventós liked to catch fluttering, light and sparkling thoughts. He filled with them 160 school notebooks that he kept in shoe boxes. Without despising flies, he liked birds: he said that you had to catch them gently, so as not to crush them. The quoted phrase couldn’t be simpler and shorter, but it sums up life today: we have plenty of information, but we don’t understand anything. So much illumination, but we grope our way, like the blind.
I admired Rubert’s sparkling intelligence, which exploded on all its pages like a firework display, subjugated by games and challenges of the mind, by a certain tendency to dazzle or, perhaps, to be dazzled. Although it could also be compared to modern radiology, which discovers everything that is invisible to the eye. Xavier Rubert saw bones, tendons, veins, nerves where we see skin, shapes, volumes. “Ethics is of little use to be good, as aesthetics is for the artist.”
Rubert has determined my comprehensive and critical look at self-absorbed contemporary art. With El corteano y la fantasma de él, I was struck by the testimony of his personal change, which I do not value: the step that goes from setting traps to the friend in the name of the party, to embracing the friend as the first option; that is: the transition from the party to the nation. But above all, I was amazed at the grace with which he rewrote the sagacity of the masters of power: Machiavelli and Mazzarino. His theory on independence as an overcoming of nationalism was decisive in everything that has happened in Catalonia. He didn’t convince me. Neither did his friend Pasqual Maragall. But he made us think.
“Playboy transformed the woman’s body into a Lladró figure; and thus he turned the sublime into the smug.” He was very in love: also with words and semantic curves. “When we look for the underpants between the sheets, at the bottom of the bed, unsuccessfully, it is a sign that everything has gone very well.” Indeed, if during the search, you lose what you were carrying, it means that you have found what you wanted. Thank you Xavier!
