Throughout that tilted “edge” or roof, “rolls” a kind of white circle “downwards”. It is a cylindrical white porcelain bowl seen from above, which, obviously, doesn´t really roll, since, like everything in the picture, is supported on the ground. In this cylinder-circumference a beetle “moves” with a cigarette wrapper “Fortuna”, trying to “offset” the fall and get closer to the geometric center of the painted surface.

In this picture, the purpose was to play with the uncertainty that implies that something resting on the ground and looked from above seems to float when, converted into an image, is positioned vertically. Seen like this, it will suggest that objects, convincingly painted lifesize, “slip” on that plane, without anything to support it. At the same time, the eccentric arrangement of the various centers in the painting, located at the four corners in both cases, forces the eye not to feel too confortable in any of them, seeing itself compelled to jump from one to another, activity that is enhanced by the kinetic disposition of the cat skeleton, the other inert part by definition.

Within the work of one author there can sometimes be references to other paintings of his own, usually current and past. However, these referred pictures could also be only hypothetical or future. That is the case here, where the drowned Ophelia has a notebook under her head, that is intended to be read by the viewer also as a pillow. In that notebook-pillow we can see a blue ink drawing, which reproduces the initial idea of the painting, from which, when it “shipwrecked”, it was broken off as a fragment that developed with a life of its own. The development of that first painting was interrupted in finding that certain deficiencies of the holder, as well as various collateral problems, recommended dropping it. Then a new one was made, that was put on hold for some time. Years later the artist cut out a piece of the first support to complete this part, turning it into a new painting, although it obviously shared elements with the first idea. While developing it, it seemed interesting to include a reference to that initial project, which had stalled due to budget problems. Thus it appeared drawn in the notebook, which lay buried in the base of the shallow pond, the outline of the first purpose of painting, paralyzed to the point of seeming shipwrecked. Years later the task of continuing that initial project was resumed, entrusted to the second support. This new painting is still in progress and will be completed shortly, entitled “Everything near moves away II”, “AllesNäheWerde Fern II”.

In the upper right, in several crumpled papers, there are different texts of different textures and colors that add to the ambiance of the painting, and whose content aims to be a Vanitas open to hope. In the center, an aged piece of paper from the magazine ABC Cultural, shows a framed sonnet by Francisco de Quevedo, About the brevity of life and how nothing seems what was experienced:

“Calling Life!” And no one answers me?
Come back, the yesteryears that I have lived!
Fortune all my time has chewed away;
the Hours my madness skillfully obscures.
Incapable of knowing how or where,
my health and all my years have swiftly fled!
Life cannot be grasped, just what was lived,
and there’s no misery I don’t endure.
Yesterday’s gone; tomorrow’s not arrived;
today’s departing and it will not stop;
I am a was, a will be, an is tired.
In now, tomorrow, yesterday, I link
diapers and shroud, and I have thus become
visible stages of a man who’s died” ^[1]. (©Alix Ingber, 1995)

The poem is surrounded by a paper, painted and rumpled and barely legible, on the conceptist writer of the Golden Age writer and his world.

In the next sheet, partly covered by the previous text, is a translation of the final fragment of the poem by TS Eliot La Figliachepiange (1917), which was actually in the same cultural supplement some pages later, and that was suggestively complementary of the previous one, keeping company to the rest of the elements of the painting, and particularly to the drowned young girl in the enclosure of stones:

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose^[2].

Similarly, in the white sheet, placed under the paper and the pan, we can read the Latin text of the beginning of Vespers, with which obviously begins the work of the Italian Renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi Vesprodella Beata Virgine:

Dominus ad adiuvandummeusintende…

Finally, at the height of the lower third of the right edge of the painting, we can see a white band that is actually part of a rigid tape. Efforts have been made so that in that section would appear the numbers corresponding to centimeters 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, which correspond to the years in which the painting was made. In red letters, replacing the mark of the tape, the motto of Van Eyck, as quoted above: ALS IK CAN, As far as I can go, adopted for the picture.

To minimize the sense of flatness produced by the faithful representation of the wooden floor of a room, which makes the image consist mostly of a flat floor matching the plane of the painting, the artist appealed to a few elements that, in addition to completing the composition, acted as references of spatial depth. Thus, along with the puzzle pieces that appear in the center, which vaguely suggest the depth of the blue sky, countering the excess of plain and the “lack of oxygen”, the artist has included a drawing that allows to arise within such an oppressive painting something of the vast space of a landscape seen from an Alpine peak. It has been used for this purpose The mountainous landscape with a draftsman, made by Roeland Savery (1576-1639) around 1605, drawn in pen and brown ink and preserved in the Cabinet of Drawings of the Louvre Museum. In this drawing, reproduced in a size that is quite smaller than the original, we can see the alpine expanses appearing tiny, and within them, houses and cows in the distance, all drawn by an artist who toils in his work on the lower right edge of the image. Their inclusion in the painting seeks, in addition to giving depth and “air”, to introduce technical variety and, resulting from this, that the apparent condition of “image” of the drawing separates the rest of the picture from this quality of “painted” and moves it closer to the status of “real”.

^[1] Quevedo, F.. Parnaso 63.

^[2] Eliot, T.S. Poesías Reunidas.1909-1962. Alianza Ed.Madrid, 1999, p.50.

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