UMA CERTA FALTA DE COERÊNCIA
My Dear Reader,
The practice of letter writing and letter receiving encourages intimacy. Correspondences of personal and tender expressions of love gild our human history, from the erotic poem Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Tanakh to Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved which was declared over ten passionate pages. In both these instances, the beneficiaries of such infatuating revelations are still unknown to the public. These are love letters to someone or something without a discernable presence, like Mieko Meguro’s exhibition Love Letter Blank, where “blank” signifies an absence or unknown. To whom would such amorous expressions be directed towards and what are the consequences of concealing the recipient of such public declarations of emotion? We, the readers—the unintended recipients, are allowed to peer into a world that was not made for us and take voyeuristic pleasure in immersing ourselves in the infectious passion of others, either out of the familiarity of this kind of longing, or from a desire to feel that way about someone, or even to hope to have someone feel that way about us one day.
Jan Vermeer’s oil painting The Love
Letter (c. 1669-1670) offers a visual representation of what it’s like to
encounter such a private and intimate scene of receiving a love letter. In Vermeer’s
domestic interior, behind a curtain and through a half-open door, we peer into
a small room to see the letter’s beneficiary clasping a note she received from
her maid who is excitedly standing beside her. The painting is muted in color, only
to be briefly punctured with light in the center of the picture plane where we
our lute-holding muse is illuminated. The painting is otherwise adorned with
allegories of passion, from the romanticism of the lute to the background
painting of a tempest seascape.
In 1971, a 21-year-old idealist, Mario Pierre Roymans, stole The Love Letter right off the wall of the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels where it was temporarily on view. Roymans was a young romantic, passionate about the then Bangladeshi Liberation War in East Pakistan which was a humanitarian disaster resulting in millions of deaths and refugees. He held The Love Letter for ransom for several weeks, liaising anonymously with press and intending to donate all proceeds to a Bengali relief fund. The scandal made the news and eventually Roymans was caught and sentenced to a short term in prison while the painting was restored and returned to the museum.
While it was not necessarily the intimate subjectivity of The Lover Letter or even Vermeer that was targeted by Roymans, but rather the financial and historical symbolism of the painting, this was nevertheless a crime of passion. Art objects continue to be targeted for passionate pursuits—take the current climate protests in museums as just one recent example. There is art about passion, passion for art, and the mobilization of art for passionate pursuits. Love letters hold meaning not just to the sender and receiver, but to an entire world of dreamers and idealists who are guided by desire rather than logic.
Like lifting the curtain and gazing into the depth of a Vermeer, Love Letter Blank illuminates the cavernous and intimate world of others through declarations of passion and compassion. Mieko Meguro transforms the gallery into a space of private-public intimacy and invites us to peer into her world of love and longing.
With warm regards,
Alaina Claire Feldman
