Cy’s work is more poetic. There is a poetry. It could be one word and it reads like a poem. It is still all about the paint though.

Tracey Emin’s words, included in Adele Minardi’s recent interview for In Perspective, manage to encapsulate in a single sentence the significance that a single word inscribed on paper or canvas can hold for Cy Twombly. Roland Barthes, in his essay Wisdom of Art, defines them as ‘written events’ – events that come to life in space and time, not those of the canvas, but rather events that traverse it and extend beyond it, inhabiting our space and our time.

In those singular Names, merged with the material until they themselves become pictorial signs, the true immensity of the worlds they encapsulate is condensed, along with the constellation of references they evoke – whether Virgil or Orpheus, or a dedication like To Valéry and To Rilke, as Barthes observes.

And so those very names become poetic words. Is poetry not an event in its own right? Don’t the words and verses that compose it become living matter in our space and time, at the very moment we utter them?

Rivela Sospeso, the title of a track by the visual artist and musician Tommaso Pandolfi, seems to me to encapsulate this very meaning. Two individual words, seemingly separate from one another, yet which appear to evoke an event, something that suddenly reveals itself before our eyes, only to leave us in anticipation of something that may yet happen. Those two words embrace a multitude of poetic worlds, the very worlds from which the musician drew inspiration when choosing the titles for his recent tracks, after completing their composition. His influences range from Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson to Cristina Campo and the philosopher Maria Zambrano, to name just a few.

The playlist, created in homage to Cy Twombly, takes its title from that track and unfolds as a constellation of worlds and sonic events. It moves between pieces selected – and ideally, dedicated to the artist – by contributors to the two seasons of In Perspective, and tracks that, throughout the year, we have chosen to place in dialogue with a selection of artist’s works, alongside content related to his oeuvre that we have shared through posts and stories.

As I write this short text, a track by Stars of the Lid, Even if You’re Never Awake, begins to play – and perhaps this is no coincidence.

Eleonora Di Erasmo

(Managing Director of the Cy Twombly Foundation, and curator of the In Perspective online project)