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“What is a good sense?”

October 15, 2026


Ricardo F. Morín
What Is Good Sense?
Computer-generated image (CGI)
2026

Common sense consists of conclusions reached well before the occasion that calls for them:  held in reserve, transmitted without examination, and applied whenever a new occasion resembles one already known.  Its convenience is not imaginary, since it spares the effort of looking.  And so it is that men and women of every condition carry it nonchalantly, and with it views of a purely stereotypical nature, accepted as norms of conduct because no one recalls having examined them.  Under its influence, people meet one another already sorted:  each is received as an instance of a collective phenomenon, a mirrored image of others presumed alike, and each answers from within a place assigned in advance.  What takes place between them is less an encounter than an exchange between categories, in which the category arrives before the person and occupies the place where the person would have appeared.

The comparison of civilizations offers its most familiar form.  Between any Latin and any Anglo-Saxon culture, common sense draws a border and declares two isolated worlds:  Italians are like that, the English otherwise.  The human condition is thereby redistributed into collective classifications dependent upon physical aspect or historical attainment.  Words such as Hellenized, Latinized, Anglicized, Africanized, or Indigenized describe the passage of language and custom across centuries.  Applied to an individual, they may say something true of speech or formation, yet they claim nothing about who that individual is:  the claim begins when a description of many is carried over to a single person and settles in advance what that person will be found to be.  What results is a sectarianism, banal and insular, which mistakes the boundary for what it encloses.

What the category erases is the particular:  this face, this voice, this circumstance, which resemble others in part and never in whole.  It is there that good sense begins, as a form of perception before it is a form of judgment.  A painter knows the difference between drawing what is seen and drawing what is known:  the eye registers the actual geometry of a face, its asymmetries and its accidents, while the hand reaches for the generic face it has drawn a hundred times.  Yet the eye that registers those accidents has itself been formed by the hundred faces before it:  what it retains sharpens its seeing, provided that each new face is allowed to correct what was retained.  The generic face belongs to common sense, whereas the actual face is available only to attention.

What is retained from one encounter may serve the next or may stand in its place.  The difference lies in whether the earlier conclusion remains open to correction by the person now present, or is applied as though that person had already been seen.  Whereas common sense is held as a possession, good sense is exercised as an act, performed on each occasion or not performed at all:  no one has it as one has a temperament or an education, and its absence leaves no trace, since common sense supplies an answer in the place where looking would have been.

Consequently, the line between the two does not run between groups of people:  it separates neither the learned from the unlettered nor the critic from the crowd, but crosses each person from one moment to the next.  A woman at a market stall who lets the stranger’s fatigue, rather than his accent, govern how she answers him has looked.  The same woman, describing his country to her neighbors an hour later, may draw on the reserve.  Nor are those who denounce classification exempt, since the crowd they denounce is itself a category, drawn from the same reserve as the stereotypes they oppose.

Good sense does not exempt its own conclusions.  A clear perception, once kept beyond the reach of examination, hardens into a rule, and the rule passes into the reserve from which the next stereotypes are drawn:  what was seen yesterday is applied tomorrow to someone who was never seen at all.

Ricardo F. Morin, October 12, 2026. In Transit

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“Within Reach”

October 11, 2026


Ricardo F. Morín
Warrior at Rest
Linoleum block print
Approximately 8¾″ high × 12″ wide
1975

I had heard Nightbirde’s words before:  “You can’t wait until life isn’t hard anymore before you decide to be happy.”  Today they moved me with a force I could not remember from the first hearing.  Had I felt it then?  Would I feel it as strongly again?  I could answer neither question.  Yet I wanted to keep those words somewhere within reach. (parade.com⁠)

A sentence can remain in memory while the feeling it awakened becomes difficult to recover.  I can repeat the words, understand their meaning, and assent to them.  Whether they will sustain me when I need them is another matter.  The wish to preserve them arises partly from that uncertainty.  Something has reached me, and I would like to be able to return to it.

The remark brings happiness into the present, where so much remains unresolved.  If I make happiness depend upon relief from every difficulty, I entrust it to circumstances whose course I cannot determine.  There will always be reasons to wait.  Even the expectation of improvement can absorb the attention through which something pleasurable might become available now.

Yet the word “decide” gives me pause.  I know how little command a person may have over what can be felt.  Suffering can exhaust the very capacity through which pleasure is received.  A sentence that sustains me today cannot establish what I should have been able to feel yesterday, or what anyone else ought to feel under the weight of a different life.  Its force belongs to this encounter.

Perhaps that is why I hesitate to call what happened resilience.  The name suggests a capacity I might possess and call upon again.  What I experienced carries no such assurance.  I heard familiar words and felt a possibility become immediate.  I want that possibility to accompany me, including through moments when I may have difficulty recognizing it.

Writing this down preserves something of the encounter.  It records that the words reached me again, that familiarity had left room for an intensity I did not anticipate.  A later reading may disclose something quieter, or something I cannot foresee from here.  I would like to leave room for that as well.

Will I feel it as strongly next time?  I still do not know.  I hope the words will be there when I reach for them, and that I will remain able to receive whatever they may offer then.

Ricardo F Morín

October 7, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

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“The Other”

October 10, 2026
Ricardo F. Morín
Triangulation Series Nº 7
37″ x 60″ x 2″
Oil on linen
2006

An elderly man stands beside a piece of luggage near the edge of a wide sidewalk at a public bus stop.  A younger man notices him from a distance, and as he approaches, his attention remains fixed upon the older man rather than upon the bus stop itself.  The older man perceives the stare as calculating, purposeful, and determined.  There is room to pass.  Instead, he changes course and strikes the older man with enough force to displace him from his position, then continues walking without explanation or apology.  No dispute precedes the contact, and no serious injury follows.

The change of course makes the contact appear directed, though the encounter reveals little of what prompted it.  Contempt, irritation, resentment, or the wish to impose upon someone may be imagined.  None becomes certain merely because it would make the action intelligible.  The younger man’s attention can be followed as far as the contact; his motive cannot be followed with the same assurance.

The older man was noticed before he was struck.  Whatever the younger man perceived was sufficient to direct an approach, yet being noticed does not establish how much of a person has been acknowledged.  Attention may be exact about where an act will arrive while remaining indifferent to the life upon which it intrudes.

Ordinarily, one passes a stranger without requiring an account of his presence.  The man waiting beside his luggage need not explain where he is going or why he has stopped there.  Almost nothing about him has to become known for the simple accommodation of passing without contact to occur.

Someone who would make that accommodation elsewhere may withhold it from a person expected to offer little resistance or to impose no consequence.  Restraint weakens selectively, and another’s vulnerability can become an opportunity to act.  Whether age or an expectation of impunity influenced the younger man’s choice remains unknown.  Even if resentment were established, the question would remain why it found this particular recipient who is a total stranger.

The younger man had only to pass.  Those charged with protecting a population face circumstances in which leaving the source of danger undisturbed may expose others to further injury.  They may have to use force, and those awaiting their decision may have urgent reasons to demand it.

A government defending its territory, one invading another country, and one acting upon a danger it anticipates do not confront the same circumstances or bear the same responsibility.  The suffering that follows cannot erase responsibility for how a war began.  Neither can responsibility for its beginning settle every judgment concerning its subsequent conduct.

Those making the next decision must confront what remains dangerous, what has changed, and what another action could accomplish.  People still exposed to attack may require defense long after the initial injury, while a brief operation may inflict harm for which no adequate ground ever existed.  Neither the duration of a war nor the depth of the loss already suffered can settle what should happen next.

For those who have endured an attack, however, the first injury may remain more immediate than the changing circumstances through which a response proceeds.  A danger recedes, an objective is reached, or further action creates risks absent at the beginning, while what happened continues to demand an answer.  Asked what another strike would accomplish, a leader can return to the losses already sustained.  The answer may be entirely sincere and still leave the question unanswered.

Grief may preserve a fidelity to the dead that no change in circumstances can satisfy.  Political action nevertheless proceeds among the living.  The demand that a loss receive an answer can persist after a particular response has ceased to serve the protection for which it was undertaken.  At that point, reconsideration may be experienced as disloyalty even when the conditions of protection require it.

Those who receive the force may meanwhile become known chiefly through where they live or the people with whom they are associated.  The person who directed an attack, the person who supported it, and the person who happened to live where it originated can be brought within the same field of action, though they do not bear the same responsibility.  No one need deny that each has a history or a capacity to suffer.  Those facts can be acknowledged and then set aside as having no bearing upon what is to be done.

The people exposed to an operation may be known to those directing it only through briefings, surveillance, casualty reports, and the observations passed through a chain of command.  These can disclose what those deciding cannot see for themselves.  Through a report, someone far from danger may learn what those enduring it have no means of bringing before him themselves.  The distance between them can be reduced by the very procedures through which the decision is made.

Yet the reports may continue to arrive after the decision to proceed has ceased to admit reconsideration.  Someone can register a loss accurately and still receive it only as something to be entered before the next authorization.  The people affected remain visible in the record, while what becomes known about them is denied any bearing upon continuation.  The information has arrived; the grounds of action have been protected from it.

Someone entrusted with the safety of others may knowingly cause harm while believing that refusing to act would cause more.  The conflict may be real, and a clearer account of the consequences may not resolve it.  But when those acting become certain that their responsibility supplies its own justification, the people who will bear the harm can appear only as a cost already accepted.  Those who question the harm may then be treated as though they were opposing the protection itself.

An official may possess the authority to order an action and the means to carry it through, while those who will bear its consequences have little power to contest either.  He can make the decision prevail without answering what he owes them.  The question of justice remains, even when he acts with a sincere intention to protect others.

The older man was close enough to be deliberately approached.  A distant population may be described in exhaustive detail.  Neither proximity nor information establishes how another’s presence has entered a decision.  Attention may narrow to what facilitates an act; an understanding of the suffering it will cause may also remain clear while the act proceeds.  The failure can occur within attention itself.

A person may understand an injury, condemn its infliction, and nevertheless permit a comparable injury against someone placed outside the protection of that judgment.  What is understood remains intact while its reach contracts.  An account of the person’s fear, grievance, or conviction may make his conduct more intelligible without resolving how he accommodates what he condemns.

The younger man continues on his way without explaining himself.  The absence of an explanation leaves a question about him; it does not make the force of the encounter disappear.  What prompted him might become clearer if more were known, but he owed the older man the ordinary restraint that would have left him standing where he was.

The other remains someone whose life exceeds the terms under which he has been encountered.  Grievance, threat, procedure, and necessity can each restrict what is permitted to matter about him.  The person has not become fully known.  The decision to act as though nothing further about him could matter may nevertheless already have been made.

Ricardo F. Morín
October 6. 2026
Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

Author’s Note:
The conditions described here were examined earlier, through the structure of language rather than through particular encounters, in “The Grammar of Conflict”.

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“The Continuity of Attention”

September 22, 2026

Ricardo F. Morín. 
Self-Portrait, 1988. 
Mixed media:  collage, charcoal, and ink pen. 
30 × 48 inches.

The traditions and rituals through which we identify ourselves should remain open to questioning, particularly when they concern guilt, repentance, and forgiveness.  An inquiry into the meaning of fasting on Yom Kippur led me to ask how a practice of atonement relates to the conduct of daily life.  The question can be asked of any such practice, within or outside a religion:  does observing it deepen our attention to others, or can the observance take the place of that attention?  Why should reflection occupy a separate place in a life whose every relationship already calls for awareness?

The difficulty begins when we treat living and examining how we live as separate activities.  We act, withdraw, assess, and seek release from what we have done.  Looking back is necessary because our understanding is incomplete and consequences often become apparent only later.  But the limits of what we can know at any moment do not remove our responsibility to pay attention while acting.  How we speak, decide, listen, or withhold a response already matters to other people.  Reflection belongs within those acts, while we can still influence what happens, as well as afterwards, when we consider the consequences.

The observance that prompted this inquiry explicitly guards against allowing ritual to replace responsibility towards another person.  Mishnah Yoma 8:9 (https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Yoma.8.9) states that Yom Kippur does not atone for wrongs committed against another person until the wronged person has been appeased.  The teaching requires us to address the person we have injured; observing the day alone cannot fulfil that obligation.  The question of how reflection belongs within living nevertheless remains.  Addressing an injury is a responsibility that follows wrongdoing.  Attention to another person is already required within the relationship before any injury occurs.

A day devoted to repentance may renew an awareness that continues throughout the year.  The distinction that concerns me is between reflecting from time to time and making reflection part of everything we do.  An observance can support attention throughout daily life.  Speaking, working, eating, and living with others already involve choices through which we acknowledge or disregard their circumstances.  Where reflection is separated from daily conduct, sincerity in observing a ritual does not resolve the separation.

Questioning a ritual can be difficult because the practice may express commitments we hold deeply.  A person may observe it out of religious conviction, loyalty to family customs, or a wish to be recognised as a member of a religious community.  Belief in a teaching, loyalty to one’s family, and recognition by others are distinct considerations, even when they lead to the same observance.  If questioning the practice feels like betraying one’s family or risking a community’s acceptance, defending the practice may take precedence over examining it.  Careful examination can also express a serious commitment to understanding one’s faith.  The reasons for valuing a ritual therefore need to be distinguished from the question of how observing it affects our conduct towards others.

Fasting may help someone concentrate by interrupting familiar habits.  Even so, why should deprivation have a privileged role in making us more aware?  Whatever attention a fast encourages must continue within daily life.  When deprivation is understood as punishment, attention may shift from daily conduct to the intensity of one’s own suffering.  My suffering does not, by itself, repair suffering I have caused.  I may become absorbed in how much I can endure and pay less attention to the person affected by my conduct.  The effort to become worthy again can then displace the work of understanding another person’s experience and making whatever repair is possible.

The preoccupation with recovering one’s own moral worth becomes especially restrictive when a wrong action is taken as proof of a defective human nature.  Recognising our limitations can make us more receptive to correction.  But a belief in our own defectiveness can keep us occupied with whether we are guilty, purified, forgiven, or restored.  Our relation to others does not begin with an injury for which we must answer.  When I listen to another person, I may discover how much my assumptions have left out.  When we make a decision together, I need to consider the other person’s circumstances as well as my own.  The other person’s reality precedes my judgment of how well I have responded to it.  Responsibility develops within the relationship and includes answering for harm when harm occurs.  A satisfactory judgment of myself does not bring my responsibility within the relationship to an end.

Confession can interrupt denial by acknowledging an injury we have concealed or refused to face.  Naming the injury can make an honest conversation with the person affected possible.  An apology may relieve the person who offers it while leaving the injured person’s loss or distrust unresolved.  In admitting what I did, I show a willingness to answer for my conduct.  The admission alone cannot establish that I have fulfilled my responsibility.

No one owes me forgiveness so that I may consider my moral account settled.  Forgiveness may change a relationship profoundly, allowing affection or trust to become possible again.  But forgiveness does not erase the consequences of what happened.  Trust may need to be rebuilt, a loss may remain irreparable, and the injured person may still need to maintain boundaries within the relationship.  My responsibility continues even if I am not forgiven.  Nor can I demand that reconciliation take the form I desire.

To live consciously does not require us to sit in constant judgment of ourselves.  Constant self-judgment would reproduce the self-absorption that can make penitence an obstacle to understanding others.  Attention to others requires a willingness to notice, to listen, and to reconsider a judgment.  Our intentions do not fully explain what our actions mean to someone else.  Continuing attention means allowing what we learn from another person to influence how we proceed, even when that knowledge unsettles our understanding of ourselves.  We will sometimes fail to pay attention.  Recognising a failure can help us respond more adequately without turning the acknowledgment into a ceremony of self-condemnation.

The separation of reflection from daily conduct can arise within the most familiar relationships.  We may presume that familiarity tells us what another person needs, or that good intentions spare us from reconsidering a decision.  Confidence in our own understanding can then replace attention to a person whose needs or views may have changed.  Confession, forgiveness, and observance belong within our relationships, but none can account for everything those relationships require of us.  The daily acts of listening, choosing together, and responding to change have an ethical significance of their own, whether or not an injury ever occurs.

I cannot conceive of reflection as an interval after which one returns to living relieved of its demands.  Reflection belongs to our participation in one another’s lives, through which we continually develop and revise our understanding.  A ritual’s importance to our religious commitments or family customs does not settle the question of how observing it affects our conduct towards others.  Another person’s reality remains before us after the words have been spoken and the appointed day has ended.

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“The Distance of Images”

August 23, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morín
Buffalo Series, Nº 5
49¼ × 55⅛ inches.
Oil on canvas
1979

On the Practice of Visual Art, Attention, and the Conditions of Perception

My distance from the commercial circuits of art arose not from unfamiliarity, but from decades of sustained participation.  For nearly four decades after completing my formal studies in painting, I engaged directly with galleries, museums, art advisers, collectors, and private buyers.  Those encounters formed part of my education, acquainting me with the language of placement, negotiation, institutional framing, and representation.  They also enabled me to perceive how readily the life of an image may be subordinated to expectation, promotional identity, or calculation.

None of those experiences was singular or dramatic.  What emerged, rather, was a gradual dissonance.  Discussions occasioned by the work frequently departed from the conditions that had governed its genesis.  What had required sustained attention in the studio could be rendered into categories extrinsic to the experience of vision, whether as market appraisal, curatorial interpretation, or institutional inscription.  The imbalance was seldom articulated, but it persisted.

In time, a more pronounced distance became necessary.  It arose not from rejection, but from clarification.  The difficulty resided neither in commerce nor in institutions as such, but in the almost imperceptible redirection of attention they could induce.  When attention gravitated toward reception or positioning, the image risked losing the quiet domain in which it had first disclosed itself.  That recognition altered the conditions under which I continued to work.

The decision to permit the work to circulate without presuming to govern its destination, or simply to give it away, followed naturally.  It represented less a renunciation of the work than a preservation of my relation to it.  The practice had already conferred what mattered: a form of joy independent of valuation, constancy during periods of vulnerability, and companionship with images whose significance unfolded gradually and imposed no demand.

The material fate of a substantial portion of my work would eventually confer an unforeseen gravity upon those convictions.  In 2009, my younger brother placed 149 of my paintings in storage at Almacenadora El Recreo, a warehousing and logistics company situated in the industrial district of Valencia, Venezuela.  The ensemble encompassed twenty-five years of my artistic practice, from 1971 through 1996, and included a considerable number of canvases exceeding six feet.  When the company ceased operations, my brother lost his shareholding without compensation, and I lost all knowledge of the paintings’ whereabouts.  For years, I did not know whether they remained there in storage, had been moved elsewhere, or even continued to exist.

Only after the company’s bankruptcy had received judicial confirmation did the proprietor of the premises contact my brother in July 2026.  The paintings were still there, but termites and mold had compromised them.  Their removal required an expert technical assessment to determine which works, if any, remained salvageable, followed by conservation measures, transportation, a formal arrangement for new storage, and a security deposit equivalent to six months of storage fees.  I was unable to supervise the process from abroad.  My brother was likewise in no position to manage it.  Under such circumstances, even donation was not a practicable alternative.

I therefore authorized the proprietor to dispose of the ensemble in whatever manner he considered necessary.  He advised me that anything affected by termites would have to be burned.  I consented without ever seeing the paintings again.

Their physical disappearance did not, however, remove that period entirely from view.  Digitized photographic records of almost eighty percent of the paintings documented between 1977 and 1991 survive and remain accessible in the digital archive on my website.  The archive preserves neither their scale, surface, material density, nor the encounter demanded by their physical presence.  It nevertheless permits a substantial portion of the images to remain visible.  It constitutes neither a surrogate collection nor an answer to the loss, but a record that preserves visual access while confirming the distance between those images and the material works from which they derive.

That act was not equivalent to giving the work away, nor did it transform its destruction into an aesthetic gesture.  The decision was conditioned by distance, material deterioration, institutional collapse, and the impossibility of responsible intervention.  Yet the necessity of making that decision revealed, with a severity I had not previously known, an intuition already implicit in my relation to the work:   authorship confers neither perpetual custody nor dominion over the fate of what has been created.

The destruction of the paintings brought their existence as material objects to an end.  The survival of a substantial portion of the body of work as photographic images does not annul the loss.  Yet the loss did not efface the attention from which the paintings arose, the years through which they had accompanied me, or the life of which they had already become a part.  Distance is not indifference, and relinquishing possession does not extinguish grief.  Such relinquishment merely recognizes that the existence of a work is not exhausted by its possession.

From this perspective, authorship assumes a provisional character.  The work neither originates in the market nor belongs wholly to its maker.  It comes into being through a convergence of forces not fully governed by the will and thereafter remains exposed to contingencies the will cannot avert.  The image inhabits a distance that neither ownership nor exchange can abolish, and that even the disappearance of its material support cannot entirely extinguish.

Ricardo F. Morín

August 22, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

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“The Inner Geography of Writing”

May 27, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morín
Triangulation IV
22″ x 30″
Charcoal, sanguine, white-out and Sumi Ink on paper
2008

Ricardo F. Morín

March 13, 2026

Oakland Park, Florida

*

The place of writing rarely coincides with a desk.  Often the work unfolds during a car ride while my husband drives, on the way to a medical appointment or in the middle of an ordinary errand.  It may also happen on a train or on an airplane.  Movement creates an unexpected space for concentration. Sentences appear in transit: during a journey, while walking, or even while standing during a brief pause in the day.  Thought seems to fall into step with motion.

Sentences move naturally from one language to another.  A text may be revised or edited in English, Spanish, and Italian almost simultaneously, as if physical movement also released the movement of thought.  The journey creates a kind of mental territory where words find their rhythm.

Sometimes writing rises from an even more interior place.  It is not unusual to wake in the middle of the night because, while sleeping, an idea or a solution has taken shape with clarity.  One simply rises and writes, as if thought had continued its quiet work during sleep.

The familiar image of the writer, however, is still that of someone seated at a desk beneath a lamp, surrounded by carefully arranged papers.  It is a comforting, almost ceremonial image.  Yet the history of literature suggests something quite different.

Marcel Proust wrote much of In Search of Lost Time lying in bed in a room lined with cork to keep out noise.  Something similar occurred with Truman Capote, who described himself as a completely horizontal author and wrote while lying down with pencil and paper resting on his knees.  Other writers found their rhythm in movement.  Edith Wharton developed her texts while walking and dictating them, and Ernest Hemingway preferred to write standing at an improvised lectern.

These examples recall something simple:  writing does not depend on a single ritual or a particular piece of furniture.  Each writer discovers a personal balance between silence, movement, attention, and memory.  The traditional desk is only one possibility among many.

Perhaps for that reason literature has often been born in unexpected places.  In a bed, on a moving train, in a quiet room, or in the middle of a journey.  Imagination rarely waits for perfect conditions.  It appears where it can and gradually turns any corner into a place of work.

In time one understands that the desk is not the true place of writing.  The place is attention.  Wherever it appears, any setting may become part of that inner geography where words finally find their form.

*

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“A Conversation With Oneself”

May 19, 2026

Ricardo F. Morín

May 17, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

*

He considers whether the biography and the career essay can cohabit sequentially within the same corpus.

They can.  The sequence already contains its own direction.  The career essay first:  closer to the present tense of perception, moving by suspension, withholding biography deliberately.  The reader encounters the intelligence before the circumstances surrounding it.  The biography afterward.  What had remained withheld becomes visible then:  the cities, the illnesses, the rooms, the years of interruption and displacement.

Read in that order, the two texts produce something neither fully achieves alone.  One reveals how a person sees.  The other reveals what that person passed through while seeing it.  The distance between them does not fracture the corpus.  It creates proportion.

He considers whether three registers can coexist within the same body of work.

A corpus restricted to one register may already have accepted its own limits.  Multiple registers practiced simultaneously suggest something else:  not instability of method, but continuity of attention moving through different materials.  The register changes according to what the material permits or resists.  The underlying attention remains recognizable.

Across them, something is repeatedly brought near the edge of conclusion without fully entering it.  Not because conclusion is feared, but because certain recognitions become less accurate once sealed too quickly.  The distribution changes from text to text.  The pressure of examination does not.

The difficulty is less internal than external.  Readers and institutions prefer writers who can be situated immediately.  A stable category simplifies reception.  The corpus resists that instinct without opposing it directly.  Some readers may find the variation generative.  Others may experience uncertainty before it.  That uncertainty may not be a defect in reception.  It may be an accurate reflection of the work itself.

He considers publication outside of WordPress.

He does not intend to seek publication through commercial structures.  WordPress has held the work for eighteen years.  That continuity has been sufficient.  The responsibility, if there is one, would consist only in maintaining a parallel digital corpus capable of surviving technical disappearance should the platform eventually fail.  Perhaps a university library at some later point.  Perhaps not.

No publishing houses.  No agents.  Few editors he would trust enough to permit entrance into the interior movement of the prose.

He considers how long WordPress itself may last.

WordPress.com is operated by a private company.  Eighteen years of continuity is reassuring but not decisive.  Many structures that once appeared permanent disappeared without ceremony.  Libraries persist differently because preservation forms part of their institutional obligation rather than their market survival.

Yet the archive does not feel urgent.  There may still be another fifteen years of work not yet written.  The corpus at that point would be larger, more complete, more internally connected than it is now.  Premature administration of a living practice can quietly interfere with the practice itself.

What matters at present is simpler than preservation.  The work continues.  The corpus develops.  The next sentence remains unwritten.

He considers whether he should simply let the chips fall where they may.

The work exists.  It accumulates gradually.  What survives and what disappears has never belonged entirely to the author.  Most of what human beings created vanished long ago:  paintings, manuscripts, cities, names.  What remains is shaped partly by quality, partly by accident, partly by whether another person cared enough to carry something forward beyond its own moment.

There may be a form of integrity in recognizing that limit without bitterness.  A prose that refuses premature closure, a corpus resistant to category, a writer uninterested in agents, publishers, or literary positioning:  all of these movements arise from related recognitions.  The same attention that hesitates before sealing a conclusion in a sentence may hesitate before sealing one about permanence itself.

He considers whether it is worth anticipating the future condition of the corpus.

Probably not.

The work understood this long before the prose articulated it directly.  The understanding did not arrive as philosophy.  It emerged gradually through repetition:  paintings delayed, illnesses prolonged, rooms abandoned, plans interrupted, canvases resting against walls for weeks while nothing visible advanced and yet something continued silently underneath perception itself.

The pergaminos colgantes already contained that movement.  So did Paradise.  So did the long periods of stillness in Valencia.  The recognition that anticipation easily becomes a form of inward noise did not arise from theory.  It arose from observing how quickly projection interferes with attention.

To apply a different standard to the corpus itself, worrying over survival, categorization, institutional placement, would introduce an inconsistency the work has spent decades attempting to reduce.

The present moment contains the next essay.  That is sufficiently difficult.  Everything beyond it risks becoming administration of what does not yet exist.

He considers whether to share the corpus formally with an institution.

Perhaps not at all.

That possibility no longer produces anxiety.  It follows naturally from the other refusals already present throughout the work:  refusal of fixed category, refusal of literary positioning, refusal of premature conclusion, refusal of treating visibility as proof of value.

The archive may survive.  Or disappear.  Neither alters the necessity of the work while it is being written.

He considers ownership.

He never took much pride in possession.  The loft in Tribeca was relinquished.  The taller in Venezuela was relinquished.  Professional identities were relinquished more than once.  Each release altered perception afterward.  Something became visible that possession itself had partially obscured.

A corpus may not differ greatly from that condition.

The essays exist.  What happens to them afterward cannot entirely belong to him any more than the changing light across suspended canvases belonged to anyone who happened to stand before them.  The work was never constructed as property.  The pergaminos were not made as objects to dominate space.  They emerged from stillness temporarily and returned to it afterward.

Complete relinquishment may not signify indifference.  It may be the final extension of the same attention from which the work emerged.

He arrives somewhere that does not require a name.

Not grief exactly.  Not resignation.

Tears of loss look backward toward what can no longer be recovered.  Tears of acceptance belong to a different condition entirely:  recognition without resistance, clarity without demand for alteration, awareness without the impulse to negotiate with reality so that it conforms to preference.

The work approached that same place gradually through many forms and many years:  the stillness after noise, the empty canvas before the first mark, the pergamino hanging without frame or enclosure, the intervals where nothing appeared resolved and yet nothing required immediate resolution either.

Perhaps the work was never attempting permanence at all.  Perhaps it was attempting something closer to lived energy moving through form for a brief interval before returning to stillness again.

That is not a small thing.

A conversation with oneself.

The question unresolved.

What remains is the writing.

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“Ricardo F. Morín”

May 18, 2026

*

During those first years through 1976, Buffalo accumulated heavier snowfalls than usual, with blizzards exceeding those of previous winters.  In some neighborhoods the snow rose beyond the rooftops of houses.  The wind crossed the streets with an intensity unfamiliar to someone who had grown up in Valencia, Venezuela.  In the art studios of Bethune Hall, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, canvases leaned against one another while students worked for hours in silence or beneath scattered conversations.  The smell of oil, turpentine, and damp wood continuously permeated the interiors.

He had arrived in the United States in 1972 at seventeen years of age.  Displacement did not consist solely in leaving one country behind.  It also altered the daily perception of the simplest things:  the scent of cities, winter light entering through windows, the relation between the body and climate, the constant sound of a language still only partially familiar.

Before Buffalo there had been Valencia.  The Arturo Michelena School of Fine Arts.  The first hours of drawing during childhood.  Later, during adolescence, the summers studying painting in the private studio of the Hungarian painter Lazlo Lenyel.  Even then, however, painting seemed less a future profession than a form of attention.  Preparing the surface of a canvas produced an experience difficult to explain outside the act of painting itself.

During those years canvases began accumulating rapidly.  Some were destroyed.  Others remained leaning against walls for months before receiving another layer of paint.  The organization of the studio changed constantly.  Painting did not yet follow a precise theory.  There was instead a physical insistence:  returning each day to observe relations of color, spatial tension, surface, and rhythm.

In 1976 he returned briefly to Venezuela.  There he studied privately with the Málaga-born artist José Luis Montero before returning once again to Buffalo under the guidance of Herta Kane and James Jipson.  Gradually the first exhibitions began.  In May of that same year he presented “Works by Ricardo Morin” at the Villa Maria College Gallery.

Conversations about art during those years frequently revolved around movements, historical legitimacy, abstraction, expressionism, or formal theory.  Yet many of the most intense hours occurred far from any discourse.  Remaining alone in the studio, slowly shaping how certain surfaces retained or rejected light, seemed to contain an experience more concrete than many of the explanations later constructed around the work.

In 1977 the Venezuelan Ministry of Education awarded him a full scholarship to complete a B.F.A. at SUNY Buffalo.  The thesis exhibition, Buffalo Series 1979, was later curated by Seymour Drumlevitch at the Alamo Gallery of the State University of New York at Buffalo. [1]  Shortly afterward, Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980, received the Birge Wall Covering Award and the Reed Foundation Award at the 38th Western New York Show at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. [2]

Awards, exhibitions, and scholarships briefly made continuity seem attainable.  During certain periods it seemed possible to imagine a relatively stable professional trajectory.  Yet that stability coexisted with another sensation more difficult to name:  the persistent impression that the real work was taking place elsewhere, far from the forms through which it was publicly interpreted.

In 1979 he attended stage design seminars taught by Gunther Schneider-Siemsen at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg.  There he received the Förderungspreis Leistung der Stadt Salzburg award.  Shortly afterward Drumlevitch recommended that he apply to the M.F.A. program of the Yale School of Drama.

At Yale the theater workshops functioned on another scale of production.  Constructions, lighting, scenic architecture, models, and technical equipment occupied spaces inside buildings adapted for the stage.  Physical labor was continuous.  Stage design also offered a concrete possibility of economic survival within New York.

During the first years after Yale he worked as a set designer in New York’s Off-Off-Broadway circuit, collaborating with Irene Fornés and Max Ferrá at INTAR. [3]  At the same time he worked as principal assistant to established Broadway designers.  Workshops, constructions, and rehearsals occupied much of the days and nights.

By the late 1980s he obtained a loft in Tribeca devoted exclusively to painting.  Large-format canvases leaned against high walls while painting once again began occupying the center of daily life.  The studio was filled with accumulated materials:  stretchers, pigments, tools, fragments of canvas, and drawings tacked against the walls.

At certain moments it seemed possible to sustain both lives simultaneously:  theater and painting.  New York still retained industrial areas where some artists could work within relatively spacious environments.  Yet even during those years of greatest professional activity, a tension persisted between the public continuity of a career and the quieter experience of the work itself.

In 1993 interruption appeared.  Due to AIDS he was forced to abandon the loft, suspend professional activity, and return to Venezuela seeking refuge with his family.  The diagnosis rapidly altered the entire structure of daily life.  Many previous continuities disappeared within a few months:  work, economic stability, studio, city, professional rhythm.

Between 1993 and 1996 his health deteriorated considerably.  He spent long periods inside the family home with little physical energy and frequent medical interruptions.  It was then that the Aposentos series began.  The second painting of the series, Aposento No. 2, was selected for the “XIV Municipal Painting Salon: Homage to Carlos Cruz-Diez,” held in 1994 at the Municipal Art Gallery of Maracay. [4]

He painted slowly.  Canvases remained stacked against the walls for entire weeks before receiving another intervention.  The body fatigued quickly.  Light shifted inside the room while the paintings remained motionless for hours or entire days.  At times the work advanced only a few centimeters.

Painting then began acquiring another rhythm.  It no longer seemed to respond solely to the continuity of a career or to the possibility of exhibition.  Some works emerged more as accompaniment than affirmation.

During those same years he worked voluntarily at Fundación Metaguardia, created in Valencia as a center of information and support for people with terminal illnesses, many of them also living in conditions of indigence.  The foundation integrated emotional support, activities connected to the arts, and pro bono medical services.

Silent conversations, long periods of waiting, weakened bodies, and shared vulnerability slowly altered the perception of many previous categories.  Illness seemed to render secondary many differences that had previously organized much of daily attention.

In 1996 he finally returned to New York in order to access the new antiretroviral treatment.  His immunity was practically nonexistent.  Soon afterward he sought assistance from the Department of Human Resources because of his condition of destitution.  He first stayed at the transitional Paradise Hotel in the Bronx and later at the Common Ground program at the Hotel Times Square.

Paradise was a profoundly unstable place.  Narrow corridors, moldering rooms, and constant precariousness altered the perception of time.  Some people disappeared suddenly.  Others remained locked inside their rooms for entire days.  The noise of doors, televisions, and arguments continuously crossed through the walls of the building.

Even so he continued painting.  Small canvases rested against walls or on improvised furniture near the window.  The continuity of the work no longer depended upon ideal conditions.  It depended only upon continuing to work within whatever circumstances were available.

During those years an unexpected sensation of emptiness also appeared.  Not necessarily as absolute loss, but rather as a gradual reduction of the interior noise through which ambition, identity, or permanence had once been sustained.  Within that emptiness certain forms of attention slowly began acquiring greater intensity:  breathing, light upon surfaces, the rhythm of the body while walking through the city, the noise of certain rooms, the momentary presence of familiar faces.

In September 1998 he received support from the New York organization Visual AIDS, which organized a joint exhibition based on watercolor and oil portraits together with Nicolo Cataldi at St. Mark’s Church.  Later came other collective exhibitions and alternative platforms.  Some of the paintings from the early 1990s were later described by the artist Jo-ey Tang as “love letters to the city of New York”.

In 2000 he received a VESID rehabilitation grant that included specialized training in digital tools and computer equipment.  The computer then slowly became incorporated into the visual work.  Between 2000 and 2003 he used digital media combined with watercolor and hand drawing to reinterpret fifteenth-century Persian miniatures through geometric processes of reconstruction. [5]

Later, between 2005 and 2012, he taught a course titled Pictorial Perspective at Pratt Institute.  Meanwhile he developed the Triangulation Series, working with suspended geometries, reduced spaces, and hanging formats. [6]

After completing chemotherapy in 2008 for an AIDS-related Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, systemic muscular disorders began preventing him from even stretching large canvases.  The hanging canvases then emerged also as a direct consequence of physical limitations.  The body slowly began imposing another relation to space, time, and work.

The canvases remained suspended for weeks while light varied across the surfaces.  Physical movements were slower.  Material reduction altered perception as well.  Silence ceased feeling like absence and began functioning as another form of attention.

Between 2009 and 2010 he initiated the Metaphors of Silence series. [7]  Many of the works emerged slowly within prolonged periods of physical stillness.  The need to explain aesthetic experience intellectually gradually began losing intensity before the experience of observation itself.

During those same years he collaborated with Dr. Andrew Irving in an experimental project on art, anthropology, and human experience related to New York Stories.  Part of those dialogues were later incorporated into The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice. [8]

With the passing of years certain tensions slowly began losing sharpness.  Illness remained present, although it no longer organized each moment of the day in the same way.  Certain forms of ambition or anxiety surrounding continuity, recognition, or permanence seemed gradually to diminish without disappearing entirely.

Painting continued occupying a central place, though no longer necessarily as an exclusive affirmation of identity.  Other things also remained:  conversations, walks, reading, physical exercise, breathing finding rhythm again, the momentary attenuation of certain aches, light changing across the surfaces of the city, brief encounters throughout the day.

Some afternoons he continued walking slowly while breathing found rhythm and light descended across the buildings.  Aging, fragility, and the proximity of death did not disappear.  Neither did they remain completely separate from the movement of existence itself.

Ricardo F. Morín

May 17, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

Endnotes

[1] Buffalo Series 1979:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/62.html

[2] Buffalo Series No. 1, 1980:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/53.html

[3] Theater productions and press references:
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/17/theater/stage-lovers-at-intar.html

[4] Aposento No. 2:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/l-series-html/11.html

[5] Platonic Interactions Series and related works:
https://www.artmajeur.com/en/rfmorin/artworks?page=5

[6] Triangulation Series:
https://www.ricardomorin.com/Triangulation_Series.html

[7] Metaphors of Silence:
https://ricardomorin.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/metaforas-del-silencio/

[8] Andrew Irving, The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice:
https://www.academia.edu/53478128/The_Art_of_Life_and_Death_Radical_Aesthetics_and_Ethnographic_Practice_Andrew_Irving_Chicago_Hau_Books_2017_264_pp

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“The Course of a Career”

May 16, 2026

*

Ricardo F. Morín
Self Portrait: Stock Market
New York City
36” x 74”
Collage with charcoal pencil
1987

He did not go into other artists’ studios unless invited.  If he recognized something in the work, he said it.

At that time, education consisted in finding a means of expression that suited him.  It was a way to refine what he saw and felt and to bring it into the work.  The subject was his own, but it moved within the traditions of painting and other arts.  What mattered was finding his voice as a painter, in the use of color and the depth it could sustain pictorially.  On the surface, his gestures remained inscribed.

Within that, he would stand before the work and look, asking what it could contain or where it might resolve.  If he recognized something, he stayed with it, not to explain or to correct it, but to register it mentally or to shift it within its structure.  There would be a pause, and he would look again, as if something already present had just come into view.

Other artists entered his space with legitimate differences.  They did not alter what took place between them.

One moment remains with him.  

A graduate student was working on a piece, a structure rising like a tapering tower, bright, near red, perhaps fuchsia, with broken glass along its edges.  It was not finished.  It was evident that she was still working through it.  

He stood beside her and said what came to him.  It recalled what he had seen growing up: glass placed on top of walls, not as decoration, but to keep people out, to cut anyone who tried to enter.  

She stopped, looked at the piece, then at him.  Nothing more was said.  

He left.  

Later, he saw the piece again when she opened her show at an alternative gallery after graduating.  There was a recording, a voice repeating that there is a violent world outside, and the piece and the voice remained together without resolution.  

Their advisor in the art department told him that what he had said in her studio did not leave her and passed into the work.  

He had not thought of it that way.  He said it and moved on.  

That is what remains with him, not recognition, but that something one sees can be taken up and continue elsewhere.  

Around that time, his mentor said something to him in private.  He told him not to take at face value what other faculty members said about his work, nor what he himself might say.  

He heard it, and it did not leave him.  

During that period, he traveled to Salzburg, Austria, for a seminar in stage design.  He had not planned it.  It just happened.  

The work there required interpretation, and he found himself imposing his own way of seeing so that it would hold.  It was not just something one looked at.  It generated a mood that people entered and responded to.  

He worked from what he saw, though it did not work as expected.  

He continued with it.  

After that, he entered a selective graduate program.  It followed from what he had already started.  

There, things took shape within a director’s limits of interpretation.  He finished the program, but the way he had been working before did not continue in the same way.  

Outside academia, he was received as an outsider; it did not extend beyond distrust.  The work remained within that frame.  He could see where the attention was directed; it did not include him, whatever he did.  In New York City, visibility opened to the same names, not to him.

While he worked in stage design to support himself, he continued to produce paintings.  

Opportunities did not present themselves for either.  

He worked on what others would present, and it advanced without him.  

The hours and the demands occupied the day and extended into the night, and when they ended, nothing was left for his own work.  What had advanced before ceased to advance and it was no longer received in the same way.  Expectations were in place, ways of doing things, and he saw them clearly enough to know where he stood.  

Nothing came of that situation, but he persisted.  

He kept working.  

When he writes, he perceives what he has just thought and observes it once more without turning it into an answer.

At times, a thought comes with more weight than the rest.  Where facts do not admit of equivalence and distinctions become inconvenient, they tend to be blurred; and where they are blurred, judgment loses its basis.  

He leaves it there.  

He asks whether anything is missing, not that something is missing, but whether.  

Almost immediately, what he says begins to take form as an answer.  

He stops.  

Because that is not what he is asking.  

He asked whether anything is missing, not what is missing, and left it there.  

It occurs again.  What he sees begins to take form as something he could think through.  

He suspends that as well.

In the act of working, what he sees and thinks begins to take form as an answer.  At times, what appears is not his, yet it comes as if it were.  He sees it and does not complete it.  It remains and returns without resolving.  His attention does not leave him.

He remains within the situation as it presents itself.  

There are relations in his life, some close, some not, and they arrive as they arrive.  In those moments he responds, not because he decides to, but because the situation calls for it.  He responds and confronts what derives from it.  

He does not go beyond that act.  

That stays there, not as something to return to, but as something that does not dissolve.

He sees himself acting and, at the same time, sees the movement that follows that action.  

He does not resolve that movement.  

He notices the inclination to fix a conclusion and does not follow it.

What appears presents itself with the weight of certainty for a moment and then recedes.  

He does not accept it.  

That movement loses force.  

He remains intact.  

The question is unresolved.  

Is anything missing?  

He does not answer.

*

Ricardo F. Morín

May 5, 2026

Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania

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“The Proportion of Boredom”

May 15, 2026

 

Ricardo F. Morín
Buffalo Series, Nº 5
48″ x 48″
Oil on canvas
1979

*

Author’s Note

The conditions that pass through this text continue in “The Impossibility of Conviction” and “The Impossibility of Recognition.”

*

Ricardo F. Morín
April 17 through May 14, 2026
In transit

A conversation,  a concern,  a loss or a moment of joy begin to take shape when they remain present long enough to demand attention,  alter our conduct or affect our relation with others.  Our lives do not acquire form through intensity or through the scarcity of what occurs.

There are days that pass leaving almost no trace.  Conversations are forgotten.  One concern gives way to another before it can alter what follows.

At other times,  everything demands attention at once.  Attention passes from one incident to another before anything acquires consequence.  What is immediate displaces what needed to remain present.  Priorities begin to blur into one another,  and nothing retains enough presence to awaken interest.

An empty day disappears without resistance;  a day in which everything demands attention dissolves in much the same way.  In both cases,  a conversation,  a concern or a loss cease affecting the way a person responds to what unfolds around them.

Either nothing succeeds in awakening interest,  or what does awaken it loses force among too many competing demands upon attention.  Boredom may appear even when nothing seems to be missing.

Proportion allows a conversation,  a loss,  a concern or a moment of joy to remain present long enough to acquire consequence alongside one another.  Without proportion,  conversations,  concerns and responsibilities begin to disperse before they can remain related to one another.  With proportion,  a conversation,  a loss or a responsibility may preserve enough presence to continue affecting the way a person attends or responds.

When that relation weakens,  judgment begins to weaken with it.  What is trivial acquires urgency,  while a loss,  a responsibility or an important relation recede without drawing attention.  Public life eventually reflects the same condition:  noise makes it difficult to distinguish what truly demands our attention,  and people begin reacting more through accumulation than through understanding.

What is near may impose itself until it occupies everything.  What is distant may withdraw until it loses presence.  Between those extremes,  conversations,  concerns and relations still manage to remain separate.

Proportion changes with the demands of life,  with attention,  fatigue,  pressure and the capacity to remain affected by what occurs.  It does not remain static.  A person may come to no longer recognize what once mattered to them,  not because they decided to abandon it,  but because the relation to a loss,  a responsibility or another person also changes under certain conditions.

Boredom appears when a conversation,  a concern,  a responsibility or a relation cease remaining present long enough to continue affecting the way a person attends,  remembers or responds.  For this reason,  boredom does not depend upon how much happens or how little does.

Dissatisfaction and skepticism emerge when a conversation,  a loss or a responsibility no longer preserve sufficient relation to what continues occurring around them.  Dissatisfaction and skepticism are not the origin of this condition.

At times,  a person continues speaking,  working or responding without knowing what still preserves relation to their life.  Even under those conditions,  another person’s affection,  a remembered conversation or someone’s presence may remain active while many concerns begin losing consequence.  At times,  they are the only things still preserving relation to what continues.

Proportion exists in allowing a conversation,  a loss,  a responsibility or a relation to preserve enough presence to continue affecting the way we attend,  remember or respond to what occurs.  Maintaining proportion does not consist in reducing life.

 

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