Imágenes negativas : Las nubes en la tradición mística y en la modernidad

Look at the clouds. Imagine. Who hasn't seen strange figures, faces, or monstrous animals form within them, dissolving to create new shapes? Clouds have always been an "elemental support," as André Breton said, that has stimulated the imagination. In the Middle Ages, they were part of the negative imagery, along with darkness or night, because they prevented us from seeing God; they were an invisibility that expressed divine supra-essentiality beyond any reductive affirmation. In modern times, clouds, those "marvelous clouds" in Baudelaire's verse, have continued to incite our visionary faculties and create fantastic images, as can be seen in texts such as Thomas de Quincey's. Studies of them in 19th- and 20th-century landscape painting are fascinating, as are meteorological analyses. stains that we find in the history of art, from the works of Meister Francke or Andrea Mantegna in the 15th century, to those of Johann Georg von Dillis, Eugène Boudin or André Kertész.