BUBBLE, 2002

Mapi Rivera

I feel the silence of before the origin. An absence of color, similar to blinding white light. A single gaze, without eyes and without vision.

I feel the moment when a soft gust of wind takes me away from that nothingness, and how the continuous blowing is shaping me. I go through a darkness with no top and no bottom, I keep floating thanks to the air that takes me away and envelops me. Thanks to a cord-thread of umbilical light that is drawn as I distance myself from that white nothingness, from that entire love, from that eternal peace, from feeling a drop of light, and all the water.

Now, a single drop differentiated by distance. I open my eyes to see my newborn self, my separate self. At that moment, my heart begins to feel a deep nostalgia. Only the thread of light that joins it to the purest light relieves my being. Here in my heart is a small lake formed by a tear of light. A drop of silence; around my joy and my longing. It is a bubble of air, a tear that envelops the breath of life. It is an eye that looks, to be able to look at itself. That looks through the thread of light, as if it were a soft, transparent spyglass.

The blank paper potentially contains all the words, all the images. It reminds me of that silence of before the begining. My heart is moved, the bubble begins to turn, the tear softens. And my whole being draws, writes, manifests itself on paper. My forms come off like skins, like caresses, on paper. I create images like velvet suits, touches that feel waiting to be touched by the intact paper. A wet look from the united center of light, and that image created, born, detached; undresses and frees herself.

I feel that when I draw, I believe; I blur and I disbelieve.

It is a birth from my being born, and in turn to be a rebirth through the cord of light that keeps me alive and extends on paper. I let that light flood me, I let that light write, draw, create. The more united I am to the light, the less I am, and the more I am the light; lighter and more transparent is the image that appears. the closer the newborn image is to the source of that image, the more it resembles to the silent image.

Only the wet gaze, impregnated with light, sees the instant of light in each image. The thread that runs through them and unites them, leads them back to the light.

Each stroke, each image, is a trace of longing and a recreation of uncreated silence. You cannot talk about silence, or create what has no form, or paint what has no color. Imagining it, I am releasing images. I create them and blow them away. I am born and I am born again with each one. Lighter, more open; it is like going unimagining a skein of images. Like getting closer, following the thread back to the light. Being born without ceasing, to arrive at the eternal birth. To touch the intact paper with increasingly subtle strokes. Where I`d become that virgin paper. Where my eyes would do not make sense, because there would be nothing to see, where I would be a single gaze of light.