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The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
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Frozen Music |
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“Architecture is frozen music." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Patrick Dennis paints on music. Before any color goes down, he tears pages from scores and presses them into the canvas. Sometimes a piece of music decides what happens next. The page becomes the ground the painting stands on. Dennis plays piano and reads voraciously. Sheet music and books have always been within reach, and he tears pages from both. The music is where this gets strange. He paints. Layer over layer, until the notation is gone. Look at a finished canvas and you will not find a single note. The staff is still under there, holding its place, but you cannot read it and you cannot hear it. And he can read what is on those pages. He knows exactly how they sound. He buries them anyway. Goethe said architecture is frozen music. He meant a building holds the same order a score does, interval and rhythm and proportion, made permanent and visible. Dennis does something stranger. He begins with the score itself and freezes it into paint, then keeps going until it cannot be seen at all. What is left is not the music. It is the silence the music leaves behind. A score is only a set of instructions. It waits for someone to play it. Buried under paint, this one never will be. Every note in it is a rest now. The page has gone entirely quiet.
And the quiet is doing the work. It is not empty space. It gives the paint something to press against, a structure underneath that no one will ever see or hear. The painting keeps its shape We think of music as the thing we listen to. Here it is the thing the picture stands on. The part that matters is the part that went silent. Patrick Dennis painting in progress. |
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| by: Gene Sasse | |||||
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