Every morning for two months Chloe Aridjis began her exploration of the Prado Museum in front of the same painting,
Landscape with Saint Jerome,
a small, exquisite 16th-century panel painted by the Flemish master Joachim Patinir.
The saint does not occupy the central plane of the image, he is located in the lower left, inside a wooden shed attached to a rock, with a lion giving him a paw from which the saint presumably extracts a stuck thorn.
There is a crucifix and a skull, the vanitas that reminds us of the futility of life.
To the left of the saint lies the spine of a closed book on the ground.
Saint Jerome translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin.
His version is the so-called
Vulgate.
The writer Chloe Aridjis, like Saint Jerome in the painting, also avoids the close-up.
Sitting in the museum cafeteria, in front of a cup of tea and a cake, she projects a frank shyness.
It is the end of November and today she concludes her stay in Madrid within the Write the Prado program, a residency for writers that has the support of the Loewe Foundation and that began in 2023 with Nobel Prize winner JM Coetzee.
Guest authors must give a lecture and write a text about the art gallery.
She prepares a story in which Patinir's painting has a central role.
'Landscape with Saint Jerome', by the Flemish landscape painter Joachim Patinir (1480-1524), has been one of Aridjis' main inspirations in the Prado. National Museum of the Prado
The most direct connection that could be established between the saint on that table and this writer is translation, something that has always accompanied her.
Born in New York in 1971, raised first in the Netherlands and Mexico, trained in literature at Harvard and Oxford, where she completed a thesis on poetry, magic shows and fantastic literature in nineteenth-century France, Aridjis is half Mexican, half American.
Her mother is of Jewish descent;
Her father descends from a Greek family settled in Mexico.
She lives in London and spends two months a year in Mexico City, but it was in Berlin where she began her literary career.
She has written two novels and two collections of short stories in English, with which she has won the Étranger Prize for the first novel in France and the Pen/Faulkner Prize in the United States.
She speaks with a soft Mexican accent and a charming hesitation in Spanish;
she speaks quickly, with a distinctive British accent, in English, a language in which her thoughts race.
“I spent my 20s in academia and didn't feel free to write until I arrived in Berlin, which was then a bohemian city, with a lot of culture.
“I worked as a translator and at a literary festival, I wandered the streets with my notebook.”
From there came
The Book of Clouds
(Funambulista), a first novel in which she showed her ability to create atmospheres and portray the strange.
The protagonist was a translator.
“For years I knew I wanted to be a writer, but at first I didn't feel prepared and I entered the academic world.
It took me a while to have the confidence to get into it, and Berlin was essential.
I said I wouldn't move from there until I finished my novel.
“They were years of loneliness and that shaped me as a writer.”
Her next novel,
Torn
(Economic Culture Fund), stars Marie, a room guard at the National Gallery in London, the same job that the character's great-grandfather had, who failed to stop the stab wounds that the feminist Mary Richardson launched. in 1914 to
Velázquez's
Venus in the Mirror .
Like Marie in her novel, there has been something of a dedicated watcher-explorer during this author's stay in the Prado, in which Goya's paintings have been another of her mainstays: the Black Paintings and the cartoons for the hangings.
Aridjis's public talk with editor and critic Valerie Miles in the museum's auditorium, held a week before the cafeteria meeting, was titled
The Mystery of Creation.
Magic and symbolism, imagination and free association emerged in that conversation punctuated by the projection of several works of art: Patinir's panel;
Abbey in the Oak Grove,
by Caspar David Friedrich;
Landscape with ruins,
by Nicolas Poussin, and a landscape by Nicolas de Staël.
Aridjis also remembered the poet Yves Bonnefoy: “He spoke of an interior territory to which he tried to return when writing.”
Aridjis captures the mood of a painting or image and transfers it to the page.
These are not theoretical disquisitions, but rather a tone that he manages to distill, for example, in
Dialogue with a Somnambulist
, the story that gives the title to his latest book.
A young woman who sells furniture in a large store without connecting with anyone, a chance encounter on the street that leads her to find an extravagant bar, a huge wax figure that she ends up taking home, a museum, a discreet romance.
“I was very inspired by German expressionism and the film
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
.
That feeling of irregular reality, the sets of the film and the feeling of… I miss the word
haunted….”
The 'Black Paintings' room, by Goya, was a favorite stop for Chloe Aridjis during her stay at the Prado.Jacobo Medrano
Delighted?
Haunted?
She doesn't seem convinced.
“What interests me when I write is that: the characters, the psyches, the disturbing city,” she says.
The atmosphere, the ghostly breath that surrounds us, are key themes of the literary world that Aridjis has built.
Art is a catalyst for his imagination.
His universe connects with painting and photography.
These frozen images contain a story or the possibility of a story that begins to move hand in hand with him, it seems to leave aside factual knowledge, interpretations and data from the history of art, and delves into fiction.
“The greatest stimulus for my writing is the visual.”
Does too much academic knowledge hold back a writer?
"Definitely!
For me it was very important to forget about my studies to be able to write freely.
I have brilliant friends whose knowledge has destroyed their writing, because they can't turn off those voices and filters when they're writing.
"I try to distance myself from theory," explained this disciple of the great critic and academic Malcolm Bowie, who defended the role of literature as a vector of thought, and its connection with psychoanalysis and other artistic disciplines.
“Bowie was one of the most inspiring people I have worked with, thanks to him I started reading poetry in a different way.”
Aridjis' connection with poetry goes back further, even before his birth.
“My father wrote a long prose poem, a memoir, when my mother was pregnant with me.
It is a book that I feel very close to, almost my twin,” she said about
The Child Poet,
which she ended up translating into English.
When Chloe was born, the literary career of her father, Homero Aridjis, had already taken off.
He was noted in the early sixties by Octavio Paz as the best young poet in Mexico when he was just over 20 years old; he had published two books of poems and participated in the workshops of Juan José Arreola and Juan Rulfo.
He traveled throughout Europe and taught at American universities, before holding various diplomatic posts in Holland and Switzerland.
Back in Mexico, he organized a poetry festival where everyone from Ted Hughes to Jorge Luis Borges, Allen Ginsberg and Günter Grass gathered.
Chloe took photos: “I saw the poets with their notebooks and I thought that one day I wanted to be part of that world.”
Her father also founded the Group of One Hundred, which activated Mexican artists and intellectuals in defense of the environment.
From him and his mother, Aridjis has inherited that concern for climate change and the conservation of the planet that translates into his role as an activist and his vegetarianism.
“I spent my childhood in the Netherlands and I think that is where my attachment to Flemish painting comes from.
“I think there is something in those landscapes that reminds me of paintings I saw in my childhood,” she noted.
View of Delft,
by Johannes Vermeer, in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, is the first painting that he claims to remember.
Her father was invited to write for that museum in the seventies, and in its rooms it is likely that the passion and familiarity that her daughter feels in art galleries and public centers dedicated to the exhibition of objects and works was born.
She speaks of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City as her “center of gravity.”
“It is there and not in the Sonora market where you can understand a little of Mexican metaphysics, something that permeates everything, the death that is behind each object or scene.”
In one of his texts he refers sardonically to André Breton, his fixation on superficial folklore and his affirmation that Mexico was “the surrealist country
par excellence”,
although when talking about it he recognized that there are visions and versions of that land that run parallels.
“As a child, upon returning to Mexico to live, I felt strange.
I think I developed that look that looks for the strange in everyday life.
It is the point of view of a foreigner.
Even in England, where I feel very rooted, I look with different eyes.
It is a distance that is not critical but almost dreamlike, a space that allows daydreaming, imagining another story.”
Aridjis's latest book includes varied stories, from a list of incidents seemingly unconnected as a newspaper headline would be to an alternative history of the conquest of Mexico described in short, sharp paragraphs full of irony.
These pages of
Dialogue with a Somnambulist
also include essays in which he writes about insomnia, about a bar—El Nueve, where he went as a teenager in Mexico City—and profiles, among others, of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, to whom he dedicates two texts. : “In his world, everything had a soul;
even the grammar had substance,” Aridjis writes.
Almost a decade ago she was invited to participate as a curator in the great exhibition that the Tate dedicated to her in Liverpool, when the
Carringtonmania
that has spread to fairs and museums around the world was taking off and has elevated the work of the original British painter exiled in Mexico.
Aridjis' story with Carrington refers to the Mexican cardiologist Teodoro Cesarman (1924-1997), a well-known doctor who always had a love for literature and art.
Writers, poets, editors, actors and painters passed through his office and often paid him with a book or a painting.
“One day in the nineties he invited us to eat at his house on a Saturday and there was Leonora, who was also his patient.
We immediately got talking and she said why don't we stop by her house for tea on Sunday.
This is how the tradition of going there to have tea started,” Aridjis recalled in the Prado.
“A very special friendship began.
I lived in England and then in Berlin, and she didn't understand why.
Her vision of those places was postwar, destroyed urban landscapes.
I sent him postcards.
When she was in Mexico, she would visit her and always say memorable things.”
Aridjis took notes after each visit, and returned to that personal file with his quotes when they set up the exhibition in Liverpool.
“We showed some works that had never left Mexico, such as the crib she made for the daughter of her photographer friend Kati Horna and the mural she made about the Mayans.
Leonora was reluctant to talk about her work and it bothered her if she was asked about the meaning of a painting.
That's why we decided to put quotes from her instead of posters, it was a way to preserve the enigma."
Chloe Aridjis, portrayed in the Prado Museum.
Jacobo Medrano
Carrington's recognition, he added, has been a long time coming.
This resurgence of her work and that of other women artists of that period is framed in a renewed interest in magic, the non-scientific, the esoteric.
“The world today is catastrophic and reality offers very limited explanations.
There is an interest in artists who offered other explanations beyond logic.
Because it is important to recognize that there is mystery in the world.
That spiritualism, magic, supernatural world, whatever you want to call it, respects and recognizes that enigma, something that almost serves as a buffer against the harshness of reality.”
Another space of refuge for this author are museums.
Aridjis talks about the Gemäldegalerie and the Alte Nationalgalerie, where Friedrich's work is housed, when she remembers her time in Berlin, but much more central is London and The Warburg Institute, created by the unlikely visionary Aby Warburg.
“I have a romantic vision of the old museum, and that was a place where you felt like you were traveling in time, with wood, carpets and lighting from another era,” she stressed and lamented the modernization of the institution.
Aby Warburg, proto-art historian and creator of the fascinating Mnemosyne Atlas, in which he tried to organize nearly 1,000 images from books, magazines and newspapers on wooden panels covered in black fabric, is a figure for whom Aridjis feels a weakness.
“He was a very traveler, he had moments of ecstasy, he was extravagant and fell into depression.
His sensitivity was extreme.
He was fascinated by the representations of figures and gestures through the centuries and in different civilizations, that vast repertoire of the soul, a cyclical drama,” she explained.
That morning, on her last walk through the Prado, the writer discovered the graphoscope, a manual rotation machine in which a panoramic view of the Prado gallery that was captured in 1882 was inserted. Another great cyclical drama.
Aridjis's dark eyes shine with excitement.
There is no doubt that she will give another turn to that machine, to the museum and its history.
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