Nature persistently nourishes us naturally, but in order to provide an equal service to our souls, we took our visiting family yesterday to the beautiful church of Le Menoux, a small village in the immediate vicinity of Les Pierres, transformed into a spectacular work of art by Bolivian painter and sculptor Jorge Carrasco, who in 1968 saw the pristine walls of this chapel as a superb blank canvas to be populated with four hundred and fifty square meters of colorful frescoes, in which he shaped his vision of the creation of man and the universe, intriguing us every time we enter this sanctuary. It’s such a rare and unexpected experience, it never misses its purpose of taking our breath away, transcending any personal preference or taste, commanding awe.
Although he died in 2006, the small village presently still breathes and embodies his spirit as if he never left it behind, partly because his family continued to live there and are doing everything within their potential to honor his superior artistic achievements.
As we strolled to the artist’s studio, still the family home, we were greeted by his daughter, sponging off one of his sculptures on display and laughingly telling us that she was giving her father a bath. The love this family feels, not just for the artist he was but for the role he played in their personal life, and the passion with which they express their willingness to share their experiences, makes this place incredibly interesting and deeply moving to me.
His daughter emphasized how everything in Carrasco’s life was consecrated to art, without any concession and unrestrained by choice of style or materials, all of which he believed already contained life within, for him to expose it. It occurred to me that because of this obsessive devotion, he might not have been a particularly pleasurable person to be around or share time with, projecting his offsprings’ profuse adoration as even more bodacious and touching to me.
In so many ways I feel personally beholden to his view of life in general, profoundly expressed in his asseveration ‘L’art est amour. L’amour c’est la vie. La vie il faut la vivre, non la subir’.
Let love rule.