Anna-Bella Papp

You told me once that it was better to come across things than it was to invent them. I haven’t been doing much lately apart from looking and thinking about what there is, and I keep coming across the inventions of others.

When you were still shy and distant, your beauty was in your coldness, closed off within you as a kind of promise or anticipation somewhere in an unheated studio. I have a similar feeling sometimes at the supermarket where the cashiers are being made into the representations of corporations and they appear to be sitters in commissioned positions for old master’s portraits. And all that painterly food has the glassy clarity of still lifes and the secrets of their production is known to greenhouses and factories alone.

Flies used to make paintings realer with tiny specks of decay but any sense of transience would be a flaw now. And anyway, perhaps the ultimate analogy between life and paintings is most evident in their very absence, when what remains between being and nothingness is a carcass with the whitish sheen of a freshly primed canvas. Something like the cliffs of Rügen you’ve described as surprisingly bright even though it was dark by the time you were finally approaching them on your boat but didn’t dare to look at them with the eyes of a lonely spectator in a romanticist painting.

Do your memories contain any noise? Mine don’t, only that you liked the sound of leaves when I walked around you as if all those golden leaves had fallen expressly to frame you. I like to think that if I will ever tire of you, it will be just that same inexplicable nagging sensation in my legs after entering museums. And I will never be disillusioned, though I can probably tell by now when you aren’t sincere without having to catch your mannerisms in elongated reflections on a spoon. And it will only confirm my being an artist in front of a figure in a deceivingly commonplace pose, if you would pretend not to be seen, quietly turning away towards yourself or towards another space, the pages of a book or whatever may lie behind a windowpane. And no matter where those rooms are, certainly they will be suffused with the distinctive intimacy of Nordic interiors.

I guess what I want to say is that I like repetition. Like the series of stripes running through rows of buildings and the rhythm our memories create as they reappear to show us some big truths, such as the fact that apartments are to keep us apart. Unity is conditioned by division and this is something not only the makers of such and similar abstractions should know. Each time you write me, I have the curiosity of scholars looking for a crack or a dent to get to the discarded and convoluted sentences that may lay beneath perfected contours, though I know that you prefer to leave your emails unsent if they remain unfinished after the first attempt. Now it is me who wonders whether I should start writing from scratch.

I miss you. 

The shadows of the drying rack on your shirt could have been a lifetime muse of a modernist photographer whose revolutionary shots have remained hitherto unknown. They remind me how I felt on the way back from the train station.

After walking with head bent down, looking straight ahead already seemed like looking upwards and eyes revealed themselves only to make the world seem bleaker. The difference between the insistent but vacant stare of certain passers-by and public sculptures seemed to be very small that day.

You said that our next meeting will be a work of art, something between us for everyone to see. If you’d be in front of me now, and if you would want to face me, the sun would be shining against your back and you would have to position yourself at an angle that would make your ears translucent with a red incandescence. It would be a Light and Space kind of movement in which light gains material presence.

I wonder, could this thinking of you be considered working? Simply noting how quickly your skin can tan into the colour of conceptual art on ageing paper? Would it be enough if I told you about what I remember as photographs because split seconds were all that it took for them to happen? Or that the impression your story had left on me about finding your blue sweater disintegrated in your suitcase at the end of your travels is that of a post-minimalist something. And that keeping the pine needles you’ve gathered from the park makes me feel like a museum guard who reconsiders walking and Arte Povera and Land Art.

Could describing you in terms of art be more than attempting to explain this inverted-looking perspective in which the buildings surrounding this place seem to be receding further away the nearer I move to the window? I don’t know whether references could make much difference and framing could bring you any closer or conversely, push you further back into the distance. Is this a press release I’m writing? I’d like to tell you about how site specific the thought of you is to me, since my mind changes you. And that, even if you don’t agree with me, then you just do what Minimalism means to me. What more could I ask for?

Did you know that there is something video-like about you as well, not because your notes are not very good, as you’ve put it, but because it is obvious how time sets strict limits to them? And I also have to think of your capacity of repeating yourself endlessly ever since you closed one of your older emails, as if closing a loop, with the promise that thinking of me doesn’t.

Perhaps what I mean by all this is please forgive me for not making your portrait like I promised I would.

- Anna-Bella Papp