Mutant

MUTANT takes you into the original labyrinth and womb where a working artist conceives, invents, and observes. For people who know Narcissus Quagliata only as a visual artist, this book offers an opportunity to know the person behind the artist.

MARICRUZ PATIÑO, Poet

Poems and images interact in MUTANT, a very powerful and unusual artwork. Written in three languages, the book compresses the whole cosmos of the artist over a span of fifty years.

NARCISSUS QUAGLIATA

A collection of poems and sketches from 1968 to 2018, which includes recent watercolors and works in glass, this book by Narcissus Quagliata is an intimate exploration on the relationship between dreams, words and images.

MUTANT

Narcissus Quagliata, renowned artist, has devoted fifty years to the exploration of the human figure as a gateway to the strangeness of life in an incomprehensible universe. Known for monumental glass installations in Asia, Europe, the US and Mexico, he is credited with reinventing the medium of stained glass. Born and raised in Rome, he later lived in San Francisco for 30 years, and now resides in Mexico.

MUTANT

SILKE NALBACH , Designer

In this book feelings emerge through a body; unpretentious, honest images and reflections. Narcissus shows his propensity for articulating the most awkward, painful, unusual, joyous, and humorous of life’s passages. MUTANT is a pleasure to be shared with the world. Lift the lid, go down the rabbit hole, and enjoy each piece, slowly, deliberately.

NARCISSUS QUAGLIATA

FRAN BENNETT, Psychotherapist

9 783897 905467 >

mutant_cover_FINAL_02042019.indd 1

Text in English, Spanish and Italian.

arnoldsche

ISBN 978-3-89790-546-7

arnoldsche

04.04.19 15:15

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The wound inside your heart ripped open by the aggressive beak of time, the wild zopilote* with the ugly red head that drags you into unknown rivers of non-human wilderness.

You pause, take a last look backwards, then you observe the earth you stand on, then your feet, your hands, finally you gaze at the horizon and the sky. A few silent long seconds pass, you breathe deeply, then enveloped by flames you walk away.

I look at your charred ashes now, and heavens!

So little left of a lifetime of excesses.

Are you my past? Are you my future? Are you a stray visitor that lost his way on the way back to Paradise?

Do you ever feel melancholy?

Figure of light, figure without a body, what do you want from me?

You stand there and say nothing.

Your luminous soothing glow pulsates with a rhythm I don’t understand and it stuns the dense-heavy matter of my aging body, unsettles my soul weighed down by the longings embedded so deep in my flesh, and the stuff that is me, so palpable.

Dissonant figure without borders, tell me about light, shout to me about light! Sing to me about light! Bestow on me the whispering luminous powder, I want to know about light!

Transparent boat suspended in gravity-free rivers, are you asleep?

Say something! Speak!

Dive inside of me and whisper to me the unknown songs of light from within!

Indifferent light, unfamiliar glow, why don’t you talk?

Why do you come and visit me in this organic dimension of blood and earth, crimson and sepia?

Can you hear? Me? I see you, that’s all.

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From sentences the meaning will drift away, directionless vessel without sails, without a rudder without a destination. Useless, words letters and glyphs will return smashed, deconstructed, disconfigured and ripped apart into fragments and dissolve. Printed and handwritten words will melt and the ink return to the original well, welcomed in the bubbling soup of nonexistence, dark, acid absence beyond understanding, the amniotic fluid of no meaning, antiseptic void.

Slash the figure open and drink its warm blood, before it turns into the nectar of oblivion frozen in amber.

Yes, you will be the last.

What is your name? How should I call you? Talk to me one last time, whisper or just laugh one final time.

Against the background hum of the rhythmic respiration of one hundred thousand meditation masters, and the percussion of billions of hearts beating on the drum-skins of the abyss, billions of moments lived in billions of years by billions of beings will be there again with you for one last time. Vanishing witnesses they will not comfort you.

Unrecognizable descendant, two worlds coexisting in your heart, without a future, ugly and beautiful swan song of my entire species, about to dive, about to fall and keel over. Remember the sea where you used to swim in liquid pleasure and remember the currents of fear before you crawled out of them, remember Africa … and the unspeakably beautiful dawns on a planet with no cities, remember Sicily the bittersweet island, olive trees, the scent of lemon in the marine air… remember Rome and the roar of the crowds, remember Beijing and the sublime silks of a million colors embroidered with gold … remember your first flights into space delighted … just a baby, gravity free, remember the first light that fed you … remember the nine towers in the desert of Mars … remember sailing outwards from Mars into the embrace of emptiness … what were you striving for?

What did you expect to find out there? Can you recall confusion when you sailed into the heart of the enigma, an embryo in the turquoise of new dimensions? All the moments lived by all who lived are now

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Male Head, watercolor, size 75.5” x 51”, 2012. Collection Adrián Cervantes, Mexico City

S 214

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Female Head, watercolor, size 75” x 51”, 2012. Collection Adrián Cervantes, Mexico City

S 214

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Mutant 2 ,watercolor, size 78” x 51”, 2013

S 214

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MUTANT takes you into the original labyrinth and womb where a working artist conceives, invents, and observes. For people who know Narcissus Quagliata only as a visual artist, this book offers an opportunity to know the person behind the artist.

MARICRUZ PATIÑO, Poet

Poems and images interact in MUTANT, a very powerful and unusual artwork. Written in three languages, the book compresses the whole cosmos of the artist over a span of fifty years.

NARCISSUS QUAGLIATA

A collection of poems and sketches from 1968 to 2018, which includes recent watercolors and works in glass, this book by Narcissus Quagliata is an intimate exploration on the relationship between dreams, words and images.

MUTANT

Narcissus Quagliata, renowned artist, has devoted fifty years to the exploration of the human figure as a gateway to the strangeness of life in an incomprehensible universe. Known for monumental glass installations in Asia, Europe, the US and Mexico, he is credited with reinventing the medium of stained glass. Born and raised in Rome, he later lived in San Francisco for 30 years, and now resides in Mexico.

MUTANT

SILKE NALBACH , Designer

In this book feelings emerge through a body; unpretentious, honest images and reflections. Narcissus shows his propensity for articulating the most awkward, painful, unusual, joyous, and humorous of life’s passages. MUTANT is a pleasure to be shared with the world. Lift the lid, go down the rabbit hole, and enjoy each piece, slowly, deliberately.

NARCISSUS QUAGLIATA

FRAN BENNETT, Psychotherapist

9 783897 905467 >

mutant_cover_FINAL_02042019.indd 1

Text in English, Spanish and Italian.

arnoldsche

ISBN 978-3-89790-546-7

arnoldsche

04.04.19 15:15