If you love printed magazines, then you know what it means the smell of fresh ink, while touching the paper and how exciting is going through the pages like you want to digest the whole block in one bite. It’s the same feeling with the first and probably last encounter with a night stand table (English for « de chevet ») –whether it’s yours or not. These little drawers of ours are full of funny turns, heartbreaking, horrifying, and maybe magically content that seems breathtaking and too honest for the ordinary external world.
“If you are losing your leisure, look out! — It may be you are losing your soul,” said Virginia Woolf and aiming her words, we have reached out Brazilian artist Matheus Chiaratti (1988) to explore what he hasn’t told and shown yet. “I’ve put together a special mix of paintings, photograph and poems. What I do like about this material is that it’s something extremely urgent for me and for my practice – some kind of backstage of the research, intimate and very personal,” Chiaratti said after spending some time in an art residency in Italy.
To Arthur Rimbaud — Paul Verlaine / translated by D.J. Carlile
Mortal, angel AND demon, say Rimbaud,
In my book, pride of place is yours to enjoy
Though scribbling hacks have trashed you as a rogue. Beardless brat, snake-in-the-grass, drunken schoolboy.
Incense curling and a lute-song purling
. Will greet you in the shrine of Memory.
And your radiant name sung in glory
. Because you loved me as love had to be.
Women sill see you strong, tall, never old.
So handsome, your beauty sly and rustic,
So desirable, your indolence bold!
History’s carved your triumph over death,
taking delight in life to pure excess,
Your bare white feet propped up on Envy’s head.
[24 August 1889]
Rivolvita is the name of a gun or an invented Italian word for a small gun, written by Verlaine to his fellow and lover Arthur Rimbaud. Rivolvita is also the name of my solo show at Galerie 21 in Livorno. The show is comprised of works that I did during my residency at Palazzo Monti, in Brescia, Italy. And it is dedicated to them (Rimbaud & Verlaine).
…but as I loved you immensely (Evil be to him who evil thinks), I want to confirm to you too that, if in three days, I’m not r’ with my wife, in perfect conditions, I will blow my face out. 3 days in hotel, a rivolvita.
Verlaine to Rimbaud, 1873
Archaic Torso of Apollo — Rainer Maria Rilke / translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life
Hôtel de Paris, in Charleville-Mézières. December 2018
Chevet Magazine 