Hoyt Rogers
Virgilio Paints an Image
Colors: the glass dome, a curved mosaic, a helmet of light. The garden as an image, a canvas. Casual, ‘whatever.’ Like when we were in school. Joking, unfocused. ‘Having the ocean right outside our door.’ And moonlight. Silver showers, but the god who rains into our laps is ourselves, awake. Our milky way through emptiness, even death. The weight of all that distance, splintering the timbers of our house. The weight of space tilting against us. Heavy with all the terrors we might conceive.
The grey ‘matter’ suffers, my friend. But we don’t believe in life or art, as though they were only nightmares. In a thunderstorm just before daybreak, colors ferment. Birds at the crack of dawn drown each other out, but now they’re caught in the downpour. To sense that is sorrow, is panic, when colors melt before I seize them. I look into the mirror, absorbed by flattened space. Without the image, that dimension isn’t there. This is how a painting opens out—and in that moment, draws us in… .
About the skyscape. Is it really remote? Bluish clouds, drifting past the edge of the moon. Beyond the stars, a spokeless wheel. We’re seeing the unseeable. Or the landscape. Is it really near? A flamboyant grows beside a bracken pond, its blossoms red-orange, with stamens like yolks. They reflect in the blackened mirror. A breeze stirs the leaves, and soon they two-step with the wind, one step forward, one step back. The leaves fall, the flowers fall. The trunk is their image, unmoved by time.
