Ricardo Pau-Llosa @ Americano

"Ricardo Pau-Llosa: The Rebel without an Inferiority Complex" 

by Armando F. Mastrapa.

If a writer, or any other artist, is not focused on what is before him—which is how I see what you refer to as hedonism—and doesn’t reflect this in the work, then he, or she, may be a philosopher or an editorialist, but not an artist.  The immediacy of a work of art is what gives it lasting life.  It is a paradox, of course, which is to say a life-giving contradiction, the opposite of a solvable mystery.  And when one focuses the thoughtful mind on what is there before us, what is immanent, then a sense of loss hazes in, ineluctably.  For that idea-generating surrender to the immanent must pass, and quickly.  The trick is to enshrine that surrender in the work, so others can experience it inexhaustibly.  That is the function of art—not self-expression, not social commentary, not innovating on or reacting to what other artists have done.  To defy the temporal, the flux, art enshrines.

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