La ligereza
Juan Cárdenas
ESSAY | 2024 | 136 pages
What is the distance that separates a work of art that is valuable from one that is not? Is it merely a matter of taste, of experience, of canon, of accessibility, of marketing? Juan Cárdenas goes out on a limb with a theory in this book: “All great works of art carry with them the mark of lightness.” It isn’t easy to distinguish what is light from what is heavy, but one thing is clear: the primary source of lightness is pleasure. Art is pleasurable not because it imitates life, but because it is capable of translating its secret laws to the language of sensitive forms. Life is light, fleeting, elusive, graceful, vulnerable, and resistant in unexplainable ways. In his effort to unravel this concept, the author takes us through a series of essential questions in order to reflect on what we consider worthy of admiration today, whether it be fashion or militant trends, the inertia of markets, the possibility of utopia, or the dark side of one of the mantras of contemporary sensibility: the search for authenticity. An original written journey that is ultimately also a way to clarify the mechanisms of its own creation. The precision and affability of his prose, the plasticity of his ideas, and his brilliant ability to present them in a way that is as simple as it is profound make La ligereza a stimulating and fertile essay, a luminous crack in the unbreakable territory of the majority.
RIGHTS: spanish (world excl. Argentina) EDITORIAL PERIFÉRICA | spanish (argentina) EDITORIAL SIGILO
“What happens when you close your eyes after finishing a book like La ligereza by Juan Cárdenas (...) is something that every fantastic book has, whether they are essays disguised as stories or stories disguised as essays: they add new dimensions.”
“This way of understanding art and thinking about reality reveals itself to be profound and necessarily political.”
BY JUAN CÁRDENAS:
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