Reverón�s painting could be the explanatory model of a modernity which does not respond either to a project or a search, which is the pure result of an experience, the consequence of a process whose logic would be that of the irreparable. It�s in this sense that the processes and their plastic effects respond more in their workings to the notion of "regression" than to the notion of "deconstruction" (which could be used when speaking of Mondrian) or of "reduction" (which could be used for Malevitch). But this is also because the opposite of "regression" is "deconstruction" or "reduction," a purely "corporeal" valence, an enclosure and a destiny that, like Reverón�s paintings, are identified with the anatomy of the body itself.

The modern features of Reverón�s work�a blinded painting, a self-sacrificing painting, a manifest objectness�can be explained only from the point of view of the body�s centrality which has three phases: exposure to the visible and to what constitutes it as visibility, light; spectral opacity, or an "ecliptics" of bodies; remnants, things, objects. Curiously, at the center of Reverón�s work bodies are represented as shadowy, slumbering presences, as flaccid volumes, as orgasmic, dreamy atony, as simple rag dolls, anthropomorphic equivalents of the baring of the supports in his painting. Reverón painted, at the exact midpoint of his career as an artist, a series of works in which he represented�and by which he represented himself�feminine figures, reposing bathers, nude majas, dolls. The figurative architecture of these corporeal scenes is that of the great bathing scenes which emblematically marked Western painting in the dawn of its modernity, from De Courbet to De Kooning. And let us not forget that emblematic figurative deconstruction of the Judgement of Paris which was the Luncheon by Manet.⁷ The symbolic architecture of these works is, then, that of a "primitive scene" which fuses an iconographic metaphor of the ending of that process of "regression" by which Reverón, exposing his perceptive body to the landscape, concludes, revealing in his works the pure body of painting.

These feminine bodies, these substitutes of desire and landscape, these figures whose withered bodies fall and look at us from the edge of drowsiness, are represented in that enclosure that Reverón ended up constructing against the light. They are the denizens of shadow, the women at the edge of the grave, the ladies of death. From then on, Reverón systematically avoided the fulgurant hours of light, the chronology of coruscation. With those bodies Reverón left off the pursuit of the midday sun and sought landscapes at nighttime or at dawn, at the time when day weakens, in order to substitute the apocalyptic presence of an excessive visibility for the figurability of landscape, for a possible, very brief, kind of landscape painting of the mutation of light; for a landscape of transitions�matinal or vesperal�toward shadow. Of all this�a vision which ponders the immensity of the earth and which, extenuated, attempts its possible image�there remains the testimony of an eye bathed in the melancholy of landscape: "geo ponderat."⁸

In his final work, Reverón substituted these melancholy landscapes of change, of mutation, of existential transition, for the punishing stability of full light. In their prodigious recording of the brevity of the rising sun or in their agonized scripting of the failing of the light, they are metaphors in landscape of an eye incarnate as soul, a sign of the physical state of the soul. Reverón�s painting then does not respond to a rhetoric of the sublime: it�s not that which is beyond representation, neither is it the utopia of light that moves it and constitutes it as a vision. Overwhelmed by the immensity of landscape, by the abysm of representation which light pierces, undermining the very possibility of painting, Reverón sought the possible�not the impossible�in painting.

And the possible is a very brief instant of time, an incessant passing of shadow to light, of clarity to shadow, a landscape art of momentum whose work consists in seizing the "soft body" of landscape, the inadvertent moment in which it no longer poses resistance�the kairos�in order to become a remainder, a trace, a pictorial relic. These are not the dilated, wide, eternal lights of the North and the South. All those who have been exposed to them at the equatorial coordinates know that their contemplation is possible only as mutual combustion, "as a reminiscence of having seen, having forgotten what has been seen [...]"⁹

This relationship to time�to its instances and its instants of change�is what is so specific to Reverón�s landscapes and it is also the specifically melancholic aspect that lies, or emerges, in them. Melancholy emerges like a stain in these vistas of the playón, in those spectral landscapes of the port. Much more than an inscription, it emerges like a dense shadow, like an ashen glow in the paintings, like a mist in the eyes. Therein lies a theory of a drowsiness of vision that is the complete opposite of that initial, white-hot one of dazzling light. Therein, above all, would lie a theory of the pictorial writing of melancholy. Small, tropical whirlwinds which Leonardo would have dreamt about in his alpine adventures represent, without differentiation, the fumes of industry; the merchant life of the ports; toiling men; the grape sellers on the beach; the undulations where the water�s light can no longer be seen; the dryness of the earth and the dampness of the riverbanks; the sexes of women like clumps of rags; the eyes whose sorrow falls on what remains of the painting of the world an instant later, or a second before, when the day surges irrepressibly with its white fire leaving a desert behind it�absolved of inhabitants who would take refuge in other shady areas�in the landscape: "From there we see the slowness of an �inscription,� the sorrow of a description which drowns and loses itself in the vagueness of these circumscriptions: �a little,� �almost,� �perhaps,� just as eyes drown in tears and the gaze becomes veiled at the eyelids� edge [. . .]"¹⁰