It Is Always Dangerous for the Artist

It is always dangerous for the artist to balance the need for comprehensiveness with the need not to stray too far from the essential. The first is necessary because it delimits, whether one likes it or not, the dimension of the artist himself, whose work will be considered short-sighted or vicious if it does not possess, if not a balance, a variety that brings it reasonably close to what life and the real world consist of. This is why some, determined to overcome this problem, end up losing themselves in works that add less and more mischaracterize the author’s identity. There is no sure measure. What is certain is that, just as insistence on obsessions that we do not possess may seem tiresome, it is discouraging when we come across works in which we find no trace of an artist we thought we knew.