Mexican - Poet | March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998
The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.
Octavio Paz
WordsLanguageMoreWhateverPoet
Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.
PaintingLanguageEscapeSignsPure
To the poet fated to be a poet, self-expression is as natural and as involuntary as breathing is to us ordinary mortals.
BreathingOrdinaryPoetNaturalUs
To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered - revelations, surprises.
WorkValueDiscoveryExplorationNew
The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
AttitudeBeginningLosingLoseIdea
In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony.
WalkSpaceIronyMovementDelay
Futurists wanted to suggest movement by means of a dynamic painting; Duchamp applies the notion of delay - or, rather, or analysis - to movement.
PaintingMovementAnalysisDelay
For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature.
NatureArtCreativeLivingReason
Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.
WorkNatureTechnologyTimeManNow
We go along, without a fixed itinerary, yet at the same time with an end (what end?) in mind, and with the aim of reaching the end. A search for the end, a dread of the end: the obverse and the reverse of the same act.
TimeMindEndSearchGoAim
Yes, I am well aware that nature - or what we call nature: that totality of objects and processes that surrounds us and that alternately creates us and devours us - is neither our accomplice nor our confidant.
NatureI AmYesUsWellAware
It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?
LifeFeelingsWayProjectSeeOwn
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