«A poem has to want to communicate something, and at the same time nothing – the nothing from above »

                            (Simone Weil)

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Poetry is a gift. It is a crystallized rarefaction, exalting thought-word.

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Who is the one walking?

You, inside me…me inside you? Heart to heart?

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Gesine Arps’ rises from a scriptural image, multiplying reality and refraction of the imagination by means of a sign that she herself engraves on paper, canvas or on the live skin of sculpture. It is the sign itself that contributes to her characterization.

Calligraphy is like a diverse and perspective knowledge that brings closer to the dis-veilings of her painting. It actually anticipates them and strengthens them.

These poems are conserved unchanged in a mental hyperspace to then come down in the present time and settle in the diversity of the landscape.

Because Gesine Arps’ poems are roaming vast fields that speak of emotional visions of the invisible and disclaim their existence.

They are “offers” of another multiple dimension.  They are the daughters and mothers of the revealed reflection of her dream world. They talk to us of our own unfinished business and of the poetical existence. They embrace the world from the bottom of a mirror to give us back the flavour of the ineffable. 

Because the word poetic draws from being deeply in awe by the art of living, in the sacredness of beauty. 

So everything awakens and resonates fulfilling an emotion which is a “rural feeling”.

Freud wrote that “every child involved in his game behaves like a poet since he creates his own world, or better yet, he attributes to his pleasure a new arrangement of things of his world.”

Therefore, just as for the child, the poet creates his new private universe. And when the poet coincides with the artist as in the case of Gesine, then the game becomes “ round” and is interrelated to the whole, creating a joyful polymorphic manifold unit that heals all wounds.

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 “Fear lives underneath/Eating the wounds

The whitewash burns/Corroding

Wearing out

Devouring […]''.

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The word transfigures every suggestion and everything in a very pure creative act. In the outline and in the sign of its existence it takes on shape, colour and image. It transfigures, as so to say, fantasy into reality and reality into fantastic oscillation. Eyes and ears drink and relive intensely the exercise of sound. In this way, all the emotional investment transfigures into pleasure.

Gesine Arps is many souls summarised into one name. She has the gift of being able to communicate them to men as she is creator of new worlds, apparently experiencing in every fringe a surplus of magic and fantasy, searching every unimaginable creative excess; generously crossing the barriers of the real in order to come back with an exposition of gifts.

Because poetry is a pure breath taken away from the invisibility of thought. It is a metamorphic bridge and a vision of imagination, intimacy, and communion.

It is the fantastic threshold of emotions.

It is thunder, lightning, a burning trajectory….

It is transformative and free image, in hope.

It is an exalted interior landscape.

It is distilled rebellion in devotion.

For Genise Arps, word and poetry precede, accompany, follow and bypass her art tout court. They anticipate her in the sensitivity of a striking vision creating signs of beauty, even graphic, there, where new emotions of feelings spark. 

«Kiss me light of depth/Bring me down dancing/way down in the vortex […]»

Everything becomes modulated sound, word-colour where poetic space is memory.

Poetry is questions and answers, diastole and systole among discovery and wonder. She soothes memory because poetry “fixes tears” to make them become beads that “carefully strung

adorn/my white neck”

There is no split, fracture, no opposition, no boundary: only a single harmonic stream.

Gesine Arps’ poetry aims always high, shooting for the sky. Just like a game that is always above everything. In other words, they are paintings that bleed from sculpture and reinforce it. They spring out from daily life but spill over reality. They spark the eye and the soul to give us back to the disturbance of restlessness.

In every expressive cord of our northern Mediterranean artist we feel beauty, playfulness and goodness. A goodness that is an offer of hope beyond the threshold of the visible. It is an “outside” that belongs to us in the possibility of an embrace, and interweaving of potentiality.

For her poetry is another wonderful string unfolding in rarefaction and distillation of thought. Therefore, let’s get ready to listen – physically and mentally- because Gesine Arps is a multidirectional and alchemic artist, she’s magic and an alert naturalistic shaman.

“Shamans see the world as

spiritual body and a creature

they conceive life only in close connection with nature”. 

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Marisa Zattini,

d'après Voyages vers la lumière, I, 258-262.

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