FROM THE WOODEN BOX TO THE POEM by Susanna Rafart

An old cava box, full of pieces of ceramics of subdued colours, as if they were blended for a light of thought. They are the fragments of samples with which Oriol Sàbat notes the formulas and the numeration of colours that he will use for his large pieces. The wooden box is under a long table covered with papers and proofs, colours, protected by large opaque windows. He mostly uses oils as a technique, with reoccurring elements: ochre, red and green without blending them. The backgrounds have a great tonal work, with grey strips that make the central forms stand out and grow even more, with titles like Bird's Burnt Heart. In general, there are reoccurring motifs: the snake, the tree, the fire. He tells me that he has seen few fires, once he saw one, walking his dog. Instead, he tells me about isolation, and about the relationship that exists between spirituality and artwork, about the austere life. The house is serene and spacious, with a courtyard and a small palm, paintings from different ages and a big library. We have tea in the kitchen and we talk of the meanders and routes through which artwork survives or gets lost. The studio is large; we analyze the ceramic pieces, the sculptures, some drawings. He has been quite autodidactic because, on being admitted in Fine Arts, he already knew the craft and many of the techniques which are used. One does not choose his own work well, friends tell him. This also happens with poetry: who does his own anthology well? His paintings are powerful, especially the one titled, Landscape Window, very woody, as he likes it. A black window that does not open to the outside. Oriol gets out a handmade book, an artist book of which he has sewn ten copies in the Japanese Style, with etchings and poems. He gives me the last one as a gift. There are other paintings around and meters of canvas ready to be prepared, pots empty of the oils that he himself mixes to get purer colours. Painting is for him the craft, the artisan work; poetry, the art of when something has to be said with necessity. The light comes in, dim, through the large windows. Later, we go downstairs to the street and cross the bridge that takes us to the station. There we say goodbye.

 

I open the book, Border with the False Green (sewn in 2002). Oriol Sàbat's poetry comes from an original source, of radical spirituality, towards the search for a universal sense of transcendence. In his books, all unpublished, an idea of art that comes straight from painting is suggested: the word must be taken from the darkness, the word that is always a defeat of the senses, like colour, like light. As a young poet, his idea of giving himself to the world becomes words with fearlessness, confronting, with violence. Colours carry moral truths: under the green there lies the lie, for example.

 

Sàbat often manifests, through heartbreaking and expressionistic descriptions, his position in front of the world. His poetry, due to this transcendental marked tone, wants to arrive to prayer, something that is favoured by a series of concurrent words: bell, chalice, blood.

 

Another distinctive feature of Sàbat's poetry is the scenographic capacity to situate his scream in the poem. Filmic influences can be perceived in it, although stillness dominates. The character of a nightmare, so common in the poetry of Lautréaumont, often appears in the pages of another compilation, Poems of the Destroyer (2005). The concrete images serve in favouring the strangeness of a perception that is looking for a further meaning, from natural elements. The palette inserts itself into the language, in which is being applied the same artisan work that looks for forms and textures to express the excess of the human being in life. At this point, the poet settles himself in the poem in prose that comes from the French tradition and from there arrives to the narrative codes that chock him to the novel or rather to the apologue that hinges with philosophy.

 

The more demanding approach appears in the text Those Who Are About to Die Salute You (2006), which puts in place the questions about the dead-end situation of contemporary life, confronting truth with power. The first poem is already a paradigm of where the twentieth century has gone: "Tree, face, orgy, concentration camp". Sàbat doesn't make concessions to himself and his will to denounce advances like the clean stroke of the artist who marks or gives meaning to human shapes. The exaggerated conscience, of awareness, leads us to another reality, to the perception of an even less natural world, even more feverish, which accuses us from above or below. And from here also comes the destruction of language, the self-destruction. The poetic voice questions the self, questions the 'ourselves', it is a seducer of the abyss, but it is necessary to know that this abyss has been lifted little by little, articulating all the pieces, like it happened in the origin of Sàbat's ceramic pieces with the colour proofs; that's why the result surprises, because the majority of the people have not seen his workshop. And it surprises because of the strong energy of a poetry that brutally chisels itself in raw bites, without a net, without contention. Sensitive poetry highly abstract. The poet says: "You want to sing a chant that is neither spiritual, nor a chant."

 

Open Our Eyes to the Ruins (1995-1999) goes inside the preceding questions, with the voice already confronted directly with the beauty left by the landscape of ruins. It is also necessary here, like in the paintings, to look at the imposed forms. However, the accusing voice is a voice hopeful about being and art. In his compilation of essays, Fecundity Texts (1997-2002), the poet-painter thinks about an essential theme, the style, to affirm that as an independent problem the style does not exist without a conception about the world behind it; the underlying problem is expression. This statement could even be considered a rash one in certain circles. Sàbat writes and paints from a radical freedom that he can afford because he has worked courageously with all forms of art that prefigure the truths that the artist wants and can reach.