Patience.
From Bergamo, from this tormented city that is waiting to slowly return to a little normality, we understand what patience is. From these empty apartments, where we now live in solitude, without the constant coming and going of relatives and friends, without meals together and laughter, and where we still try to maintain inner order, against all this death, the inner order of watering the flowers, of working, of maintaining friendships and affections by phone, where we wait for the night to speak with Javier, we know what patience is. But it is not in this literal sense that Javier has chosen this title for his book about the peat bogs of Ireland, but in a metaphorical sense. Here, the metaphor is still understood in a way contrary to what would be more common in the Spanish tradition: the baroque sharpness, the more or less empty stylistic exercise, the "ribobolo", the tangle, as Carlo Emilio Gadda would have said, with an untranslatable and perhaps onomatopoeic word, indicating the sterility of too many images. From the corner of Galicia where he lives, A Baña, a place that so well reminds us of Ireland, Javier reconducts the metaphor to the cognitive potentiality that Aristotle spoke of in the third book of his Rhetoric. For the Greek philosopher, metaphorizing is a natural capacity to see not the similarity, as others believe in an erroneous interpretation of those intense steps of his work, but the homoios, "not the similarity, but the equal, the identical among the different" (my translation), as my friend Stefano Gensini writes. In this sense, inherited from Euclid, metaphor is a powerful means of knowledge that has an enormous advantage, according to Aristotle, over the paragon: speed. Things are not “like”, things “are”. Love is not like a sun, love is a sun. Aristotle knew well that the path of knowledge is a pleasure, and therefore, it is important that it does not bore. The speed of metaphor puts before our eyes concepts and ideas that immediately assume a form, a visual instrument that concretizes abstract ideas for us. Photography, good photography, is always metaphorical: we who look at it see the thing, but at the same time we see something else: a state of the world, a state of mind. In this book by Javier the metaphor of patience is used in two senses: the patience of the mob and the patience of man. The patience of the mob: millennia to form, stratum upon stratum, with an imperturbable and good slowness. The patience of man: in isolated houses, with the hard work of the fields, with only a little peat to warm themselves and make a fire, without leaving their homes, even if they are so abandoned. Landscape and people merge into an identity of desolate beauty and we understand this strange and distant world immediately and with all the depth of emotion.
The emotion of the photographer.
Federica Venier
Bergamo, April 18, 2020.