The first time I faced Alejandro Rosemberg´s artwork I had a unique experience. While my superficial intelligence suggested skill and gift, my deep brain evoked some philosophical propositions. The ideas that Shopenhauer writes in The world as will and representation appeared to me as being linked to bishop Berkeley’s most interesting thoughts. If reality only exists in relation to the subject that perceives it -and this criterion has proved to resist careful analyses over time-, we should then accept that the world as we perceive it involves a relatively shared criterion of representation and multiple ways in which it can be expressed. Thus, we acknowledge the validity of so many different languages which reflect what we all perceive in similar terms but express only through unique conceptual structures. As the French historian Jaques Le Goff sharply observes, collective imagination feeds on legends and myths. In turn, these undergo transformations that enrich and complete them. Sensations turn into ideas/ concepts, and these into words and images. This process could be defined as the collection of dreams of a society, even of an entire civilization. A system -in a word- capable of transforming reality into passionate mental images.
These mysterious sequences are ruled by their own secret laws and they take us from one link to the other without any indication of where the origin is, if there were one. Such an enigma will keep its virtues independently of the artist’s merit, but when he accepts his role of translator, he takes us to other heights. We are as intelligent as the ideas we understand and as sensitive as the images that hurt us. A work of art is, as any other human product, a transformation of pre-existing experiences, an attempt to look and find what there is in common between those experiences and the capacity –if there were one- of formulating new ideas or shedding light over allegedly known realities. The artist is subject and site where a collective and ancient perception is synthesized. When we are moved by his work, we have undergone two equally complex processes. On the one hand, we have been illuminated and on the other we have become linked to another -the artist- and to other interlocutors in a religious way, in a literal sense. In more obvious or evident aspects, Alejandro Rosemberg’s work reformulates a discussion regarding shapes and contents, and makes it clear that the character and deepness of one and the other find correspondences and harmonies that overlook, in his case, habits and customs, favoring more transcendental findings.
We must believe him. One might wonder what has happened with 100 years of vanguards. The answer is that they are all there, properly processed, in their way to potential transformations that are impossible to foresee today. “He who has eyes to see, let him see”. In any case, we can trust old Goethe. He used to say “the animal is instructed by its organs”. He might have referred to artists like Alejandro that have the courage to listen to his own heart and the strength to close his eyes to novelties which may give temporary prestige but which age before being born.

Arturo Hayatián.