I wonder what Rothko might have thought when he walked the Roman streets in 1950.

In a land where the horse used to be of greater value than the tent you lived in it shouldn´t surprise us much to see those huge SUVs in front of houses that are barely the same size. Not only that, I suppose there is no couch in the whole house as comfortable as the leather bench seat, no stereo matching the fat sound of the built in woofers and the installments for the house are probably higher than the monthly gas bills, even for a monster like that. That´s why.

When Roberto Murle Marx woke up one morning he had dreamed about turning the whole of Copacabana into a garden. Whenever the garden needed water the waves from the ocean would gently water the lawns, retreat into the ocean leaving them to dry in the sun until they had transformed into waves of stone.

Just visited Varvakios Agora, a truly beautiful and "orthodox"meat market. Here it is all about the art of butchering whereas the aesthetics of fragmenting an animal into its anatomic parts has been more and more banned from Western Protestant civilization by presenting the cuts as an artificial, disconnected part of the animal, which looks like it never actually lived. There seems to be an inner logic of not eating the parts of an animal that define its very existence, its head, the brain as well as all the life spending organs. Thus we could say that people in Western societies of today tend to only eat the parts of an animal that are dispensable to its life, letting their subconsciousness suggest they didn´t kill the animal!

 

GALLERY

IF IT ONLY WAS THAT EASY!

When does genius reveal itself? In the case of 8 year old Picasso it obviously did very early. Those tiles in the „tasting room“ of the wonderful Bodega Tradicion in Jerez de la Frontera are not only proof of a child prodigy but more than that show a concept of directness that Picasso would eagerly follow all his life. We wouldn´t have wondered if he had done the same thing 50 years later.

I wonder how many people have seen the Pyramids more than once? The Pyramids are one of those sights that you only visit once in your lifetime. Maybe it is because they basically are a graveyard, maybe it is because they are what they are. Necrolatry. Death cult. To see them is to accept death. For our whole life we push away the awareness of mortality but looking at the Pyramids seems to tell us one thing. „Look closely, before you see them again you´ll be dead!“

Coming back from the restaurant where she had helped her cousin with the preparations of the wedding party she wore the green hijab that her mother had given her only two days ago. Since it was her first hijab she still didn´t feel comfortable wearing it until she passed an old car standing at the roadside covered under a green blanket. Just like herself.

This sketch painted by the great Sienese painter Beccafumi in 1546 is one of the most fascinating obscurities in art history. It is one of the lesser known pieces at the Louvre eventhough it looks well ahead more than 300 years without any pretension or will but only by chance. The style in which it is painted must have seemed ultra modern not only to his contemporaries but also to Beccafumi himself for it clearly shows signs of abstraction which even in sketches of that time were unusual, given the fact that the art of painting had just reached the highest level of naturalism in portraying people with virtually photographic precision. If you hang this picture next to a Cezanne portrait of roughly 330 years later they truly seem to come from the same period. Imagine Bach having written „Sympathy for the devil“!

March 30, 19 MEZ,  Vernissage "I Muri" at the wonderful "Crossings" gallery in Hamburg, Admiralitätsstrasse 71, 20459 Hamburg. Looking forward!

Having the right passport, it only takes you a couple of minutes to stand on the holy grounds of all three monotheistic religions in the old town of Jerusalem. Only in the city of God it seems one can understand the true reason for religious hostility and intolerance.

Don´t live to close to one another!

The little chits of paper on the polished limestone floor of the Western Wall, the grass shining through under the rock in front of the al-Aqsa Mosque from which Mohammed ascended and the wooden plank, reminder of the wooden cross at the Church of the holy Sepulcher.

Too close!

Cypress trees line the narrow road that runs along the foot of the "Monte Pulciano" on which hilltop the small but famous city of the same name (Montepulciano) is located. At the roadside you find the likewise famous church of the Madonna of San Biagio, which throughout the centuries served as a pilgrimage place to many believers. Nowadays the believers are rather profane, they come to eat the best steak in the world. What looks like a plain T-Bone steak is known all over Tuscany as "la Bistecca Fiorentina", which refers to its noble background in the city of the Medici rather than the origin of the meat itself that usually comes from an area 50 miles South of Florence called the Val di Chiana. The valley has given the special beef critters their name, "Razza Chianina". Even at first glance, the white Chianina beasts look exceptional, they are not only the oldest breed of cattle in Italy but also the largest in the world. With the pronounced shoulder blades and their almost haggardly looking body grazing the day away you can´t but get the impression of "sacred animals". Let´s slaughter the sacred cows! Christiana, while putting a magnificent 1.4 kilo steak on the grill, candidly admits that it is not her but the butcher, a certain Signore Maselli, we should praise, for it is the animal, its pasture and right aging that makes a perfect bistecca. Like a flat living sculpture, the shiny surface gleaming in different shades of earthy colors the bistecca is brought to the table and immediately cut into chunks of bloody beauty by Davide who then adds only a few drops of olive oil and some salt crystals. Ecco la Bistecca! Fire, meat, oil, salt, basta! In the beginning there was fire, the culinary illumination of mankind, which is still lighting the kitchens of the world today, but nowhere more beautifully than in the form of a Bistecca alla Fiorentina!

The Strada Provinciale 21 leads from Trapani to the most South Western town of Sicily, Marsala. When you take that road you suddenly realize that even though the distance between both cities is only 30 kilometers you actually travel into a different world. Africa. With its colorful facades, the almost tent like apparition of the one story houses along the road, everything changes on this little stretch and reminds you not only of the Saracen heritage but also the simple fact that Africa is so much closer than Rome.

There are so many mythical things you hear about Corleone before you get there that you instinctively think you will be disappointed. It is a matter of expectation. If you expect to see anything particular or even beautiful, forget it and think about your expectation again. Why should a place like Corleone be beautiful, why should it be outstanding, remarkable, even special? You honestly expect a place where modern crime was invented to be beautiful? As most of the boys I was of course fascinated by the Mafia. Everything seemed to be allowed and secret and life as a member of the Mafia seemed like an eternal extension of boyhood, what else could a 10 year old ask for? When I first saw pictures of real Sicilian Mafiosi of today (mostly in handcuffs on the way to jail or already in) I noticed that they, contrarily to their U.S. relatives, were all dressed in a conspicuously inconspicuous way, as if they had to show the world that the Cosa Nostra (our thing) of the mafia is much more important than having money and show it. When they caught Provenzano, the last great capo di capi and ruler of the Mafia world, just outside of Corleone, he was dressed in a simple jacket and wore 2$ glasses, just like the town he had lived in all his life. Corleone.

Only the hippest of the hip cats can afford to not even put their name on the cover. Even Warhol had to put his name next to the Banana, so people would know. He didn´t care. A record cover cannot come any closer to a piece of art than this. No typo, no catalogue number, nothing is distracting from the picture itself, printed in deep black & white on heavy 12x12 inch cardboard, perfect understatement, a true masterpiece artifact of the 20th century. 1955. Simple as that. The music is the same. No pretension, no fancy concept, just straight ahead, beautiful blowing by the inventor of Cool and his favorite rhythm section. That´s the great thing about most record covers, with or without names, titles or numbers they still give you an idea of what to expect. 

Miles Davis.

On the Southside of Piazza San Marco which Napoleon called the living room of Europe and the locals simply refer to as „la Piazza“ you find the Procuries, an arcaded structure of almost 200 yards that houses the oldest café on the European continent, called „Caffe Florian“, founded in the year of 1683.

320 years later I am sitting in the Florian taking my eyes off the tourist flock on the sunny Piazza looking at the arcades in the shade...

It has always struck me that walking through Manhattan does at times feel like walking through a giant mirror labyrinth, from every angle you can see the high rise buildings reflected, thus without having to tilt your head you have a horizontal image of a vertical city which is pretty exciting.