Author: Martorell, Antonio
Pages:96
"With a series of brief stories and a succession of mysterious images, Antonio Martorell opens the closet (the armario, in Spanish) and the dresser drawers to reveal what's inside: a hat, a skirt, a pair of suspenders, a pair of pants, a ring. The parts allow us to imagine the whole. But this illuminating voyage a l'armoire also takes us inward, soulward, 'to a place where we find lost times, voices, and bodies as well as a hint of sensual pleasure and not a few ghosts. The different connotations, suggestions, meanings of "putting on" and "taking off," "dressing" and "undressing" become "embodied" in the poetics of a private, hidden, perhaps inner space. As in a dream, the absent becomes present in images and memories. Andrew Hurley - the brilliant collaborator and translator of Martorell - shrewdly points out that that poetics evoke the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland. What is seen and what is heard? Stepping through the looking-glass, the potential of each garment, each article of dress, is discovered. One also recalls the classic sonnet by Garcilaso de la Vega: "O sweet garments by me ill found!.." But in the Puerto Rican armario/almario (a closet for souls, one might say), the garments do not connote abandonment or death. On the contrary. When they "come out," they illuminate the desire to live, to bear witness, the voice modulating, the garments, and the artist, reinventing themselves over and over again" (Arcadio Díaz Quiñones).