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Essay
by Seyyed Hossein Nasr for Vicente
Pascual "IN ILLO TEMPORE" exhibition catalogue at the
Luther
W. Brady Art Gallery, Washington DC, 2003
Vicente
Pascual Rodrigo was brought up and educated in an area of Spain which
was for centuries witness to the harmonious presence of Jewish,
Christian and Islamic cultures. As he matured, he realized that
the truth was universal and he thereby adopted a universalist
perspective rooted in the perennial wisdom to be found throughout
the ages in various sacred traditions. He also realized that only
in the modern world have these perennial truths been denied, being
replaced by all too human fashions of thought and art marked by
temporality and transience. His mind and soul therefore took flight
into the sacred spaces of various religious universes and his
art sought to bring that which is beyond temporality into the
temporal domain.
We might ask with Vicente Pascual, "what is art?" In
the deepest sense art is life itself lived and acted according
to principles. It is also to make and create correctly not on
the basis of individual psychological elements and factors, but
according to intelligible principles in the Platonic sense that
transcend temporality and the individual realm. It is to use symbols,
as traditionally understood, namely as reflections of higher orders
of reality in the physical world and therefore ladders to those
higher worlds, and not remain satisfied with the use of allegory
which is simply humanly constructed and horizontal.
Today we live in a world which has rejected this perennial philosophy
of art and therefore poses the greatest challenge to artists who
still seek to present the eternal and the atmporal in their art.
Vicente Pascual is among that rare group of contemporary Western
artists who have accepted this challenge. He has used primordial
symbols and has returned to the simplicity of primal forms to
integrate multiplicity into unity. When one views his canvasses,
one experiences the presence of unity in the manifold and the
timeless in what is temporal. His paintings also represent a harmonious
wedding between rigor and freedom like the cosmos itself in which
one observes the presence of rigor, of geometry and of laws combined
with the freedom and exuberance of life and its transformations.
Vicente Pascual is a contemporary artist without being modern.
He lives in our times, yet creates an art that is atemporal. For
him as for tradition artists of old, all human activities can
become art in the deepest sense and also become means of knowing
oneself and ultimately knowing that truth which transcend the
human order. Being who he is, he has faced many difficulties in
the present day artistic scene. Those who hold the modernistic
view of art have realized that he stands apart from them and belongs
to another category of artists. He has experienced all the oppositions
and the constraints which a traditional artist faces in today's
world. And yet he has refused to sacrifice his principles and
continues to produce works which seek to reflect non-temporal
realities in the matrix of time and space. For that very reason
his paintings are worthy of great attention for they are concerned
with truths which it is of the utmost significance for men and
women to re-discover and experience in this day and age marked
by the turning away from perennial wisdom and instead seeking
evanescent shadows which are claimed to be of great significance
because they define "the times" but which in fact, are
as passing and transient as the water of the river of time which
we experience briefly at different moments of our earthly life.
Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, Bethesda, 2003
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Born
in Tehran in 1933, Seyyed
Hossein Nasr received his education in Iran and the
United States.
He returned to Iran in 1958 where he served as Dean
of the Faculty of Letters and Chancellor of Aryamehr
University. He also founded the Iranian Academy of Philosophy
and served as its first president. Since 1984, Dr. Nasr
has been University Professor of Islamic Studies at
the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.,
and President of the Foundation for Traditional Studies.
Professor Nasr has written over twenty-five books including
Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man
(Kazi Publications, 1998), Religion and the Order
of Nature (Oxford, 1996) and Islamic Art and
Spirituality (SUNY, 1987.)
Related
links: wikipedia
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www.nasr.org | www.gwu.edu/~dimock/pascual.html
| www.beaconofknowledge.com
| www.fonsvitae.com
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copyright © Seyyed
Hossein Nasr 2003 |
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