Art & Design &Poetry Entropy | 28 Jun 2009
Cezanne and Family
When he was excavating form from facts –
finding the geometry of trees and Mont St Victoire –
he was doing what you’d like to find
a bye-way to, translating ravages of daily dross
into an illuminated shape or two, simple as light
but holding all the prickly specific unspeakable
matter of fact, a grasping at (think the thousand
cuts of colour, paint laid and laid, angling into
into a new veracity) that offers a centre but
no easy symmetry, coming to a point, yes,
but letting the disorderly goings-on of nature
go on, undisciplined as they are and no
containing them. Could it be like families,
you wonder, the way they don’t or rarely ever
make clear and formal sense, yet the facts
add up and we stand there, astonished by them.