Patio de Artistas – Artists’ Patio

The sun has completed its performance. The moon illuminates the chairs that await by the side of a patio where life was a flow and sometimes flew. On one side, a zinc watering can rest next to a pot full of petunias. I arrange the chairs. I bring closer a round table with iron legs and a ceramic top. I don’t know if its drawings are blue, or if the nocturnality bathed in moonlight paints everything in that color. I sit down and wait.

In the background, a grapevine climbs up a column and extends along some trellises from wall to wall. Lush like a natural canopy, it shields from the summer sun at noon. Beneath it, there sleeps a long wooden table and a bench, along with some stacked chairs.

Sitting in the fainting light, I close my eyes and open my soul to echoes of other times. The body becomes a sounding board. Laughter, songs, guitars, slightly scratched records, and applause from other patios where one enters without knocking can be heard. Echoes that inscribe a score of stars on the night’s blackboard for a new performance. Another guest comes to tell me how she or he did it, how she or he dreamed it.

It’s not a coincidence that I choose a Patio to welcome artists.

The patio was the stage where a little girl performed in front of cousins and grandparents when a sheet her mother hung from the grapevine served as a curtain.

In those tiles were imprinted, while playing with his grandfather, the first tap dancing steps of the one who hadn’t even dreamt of becoming a dancer yet.

A greenish bronze pipe, still anchored to the wall, evokes the wounds of those feet that dreamt of being on pointe even when the piggy bank was empty.

The jasmine that perfumes the wall witnessed the first moves of the girl dancing embraced to her father, to the 2×4 beat.

The patio was the rehearsal space where he sweated illusion, under the careful eye of his mother who lovingly embroidered his costumes.

Out of the very shadows in the corners of the patio, which used to scare him so much, a child imagined characters that now populate the stories he writes.

In the patio, many struck the first chords on a guitar. They learned to dance, to sing, to paint, to act. The patio bears witness to art as the ground on which one can stand to make a living, even one different from which the family novel or an exterior of closed doors predetermined.

A ground that sustains you in view of the fall when the void that makes room for desire becomes an abyss. Through art, a deep thirst for life can shape a glass, or the fire of eternal yearning can forge the chisel that sculpts the rock, twisting its destiny from lava.

Art is the fulcrum where power overcomes resistance. The artist tears open the sky with their voice or instrument, and the divine bathes the earth, making it fertile; it sets into dance what would otherwise spin endlessly in the same place.

The patio was the place of the long table where family and friends gathered to eat. A meeting place and a haven. A place to «ramble on» beneath the grapevine’s shade. Philosophical afternoons and nights where everything from staging to life itself was conceived.

The patio speaks of our ways of experiencing emotions, customs whose traces go back to our grandparents’ lands; and in that sense, it represents a common ground that unites artists and communities.

«Patio de Artistas» as our very place that shelters them is the reason for the name of a magazine that aims to be, above all, a space for listening to artists. With «inter-views» that reveals more than just words. A tapestry where, between questions and answers, what was risked into work is stitched. A mirror whose reflections can illuminate the path of those who play in the courtyard today.

Like a spotlight that illuminates the center of a stage as it awaits the artist, a beam of moonlight seeps through the grapevine’s leaves, illuminating the center of the patio. The neighborhood is quiet, a dog barks in the distance. A neighbor listens to tango. The raspy voice phrases like no other: » Uno busca lleno de esperanzas, el camino que sus sueños prometieron a sus ansias…». My guest arrives. He enters without knocking. I kindle a garland of lights that borders the patio’s cornice. I give him a hug, and we sit down to talk.

Flavia Mercier