Exercises.

 

The safe hours.

 

Maxi Rossini occupies surfaces with the boisterous, crisp efficiency of termites. If it is territorial, it is not in the manner of a 15th-century conqueror, but rather like a bee that, immersed in its diagram, designs the corners of the home. Drawing becomes a way of occupying the hours, in the way in which the hours decide to go one after the other, disappearing without anguish. If the wefts are fraying, it is the unfinished fabric that he prefers to keep quiet: he is afraid of not leaving space for the future.

 

Rossini collects notebooks of different sizes. He lays them down on a glass table. Then arrange the table in the middle of the space, like a melancholic sleeping beauty. In that gray limbo, made of graphite fire, of old age in a sepia key, the notebooks breathe, and in each exhalation the paper moves away from the glass, the sheets fold over a blank, amnesic back.

 

(A domestic interior scene: gathered at the table / they draw / the heads under the lamps very close to the paper / they cast shadows /

It is the thought that emanates from the plot of the forest / It is the ghosts that refuse the opinion of the grid.)

 

Rossini draws many hours in a row. Sometimes for days he doesn't draw anything. And then he draws a lot for a very short interval. He surrounds himself with blank sheets where he sharpens the graphite to later go to the notebook page. But first, the blade is full of daylight, a hue that cannot be captured on the line.

Since man had the need to hold objects he also had the need to use ropes and knots. There are many kinds of knots, those that are difficult to undo, those that weaken the rope and reduce tension, those that lock irreversibly as it slides to the end point. But there are knots that have no other purpose than to change the shape of the rope. They are the trimmings. Precious, complex, inextricable ornaments. Beautiful finishes that complete things, making the world a much more pleasant place.

 

Rossini draws his circle of trust. Decorate your shelter. There he meditates on the impossibility of becoming a mere spectator of the hours, the difficulty of refraining from recording points in the desert. He says he accumulates time. But time does not accumulate. It is not retained.

 

Rossini, like a quipu, manages events.

 

 

Veronica Gomez