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Rossella Matamoros Jimenez
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My Little Books         Personal Glossary    -    Press

These brief extracts from my own texts and from other people’s writings have accompanied me throughout these 30 years of research and graphic experience, and reveal some of the unifying threads of my work. I have recorded much of this material in dozens of small sketch books, which are like logbooks in movement that I still keep.
1988
... I have dreamt of monsters…I have battled with them… the struggle of the creative identity to release itself from encounters, anguish, nightmares, cruelty...abuse… 
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros.

1989
Movement is constant, changing speed... I’m part of the living mechanism of this world.
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros.
... emotions permeate the physical and biological... the echoes of the message transmitted resonate in the spiritual...
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros.

1990
Energy comes, energy continues, it does not disappear, it grows stronger with time and faith.
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros.
I was born with a very long dress, probably to adorn it with ribbons, brooches and stars. In my gown I carry people, memories and lights.
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros.

1991
... thousands attend the dance of terror.  A permanent nightmare, one earth, one pain, one cry...night. One earth? 
—Washington DC. Rossella Matamoros.
...curtains of human beings moving, collapsing. Attack? What do we say? How do we see? 
Do we move?
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros.
In a storm of electrical impulses my mind flies, flies, my skin is refreshed and my hair is purified...in this creative state awareness is expanded, the vortex of thoughts is sharpened...there I discover everything. 
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros
...they embrace me, in a strong embrace,
so that I don’t forget to live, dream,
feel, play, pray...

—Washington DC. Rossella Matamoros

1992
...I want to find the mountain and take refuge there, and I will send a message so that he will come and stay forever/ definitively... to build a cosmic nest reaching upward... to then extend my arms and touch the starry sky.
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros

1994
….devoted to visible tasks and others that are not seen, I see my creative/created world more clearly ...imagining characters I live my life through gestural images that glide against the fabric of daily scenes and sometimes, suspended in the air I paint while listening to the musical movement of another creator. 
—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros
...we are all born in the tide, we all grow in the tide, we sail with the ebb and flow of the tide, to finally leave with the tide.
—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros

1995
 One instant is eternity, eternity is now. When you see through this one instant, you see through the one who sees. 
—Wu-men

1996
The Great Way has no gate; there are a thousand paths to it. If you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone.
-Wu-men
...there is not enough compassion to change the color of the liquid of suffering, but there is hope that can change its flavor .
—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros

1997
Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love.
—George Sand
This mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding; as difficult to subdue as the wind.
—Bhagavad-Gita
...her wings are ready to fly in a different way... until that moment comes she will have to walk along paths of sharp/angular stones...she must keep moving forward without looking back...
—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros
It’s raining, raining hard and there’s a storm. It’s raining inside me. I move toward the walls of my temples and my breast. The burden weighs me down ... to continue in such solitude - a hand, a body, an embrace, a kiss, a life, a dream?
—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros

1998
I ask all blessings, I ask them with reverence, of my mother the earth, of the sky, moon and sun my father. I am old age: the essence of life, I am the source of all happiness. All is peaceful, all in beauty, all in harmony, all in joy.
—Anonymous Navajo

2000
Waiting, transformation, the tacit presence, the borrowed space, survival ...
—Japan, Rossella Matamoros
Coming, going, the waterbirds don’t leave a trace, don’t follow a path.
—Dogen

2001
When the grapes turn to wine, they long for our ability to change. When stars wheel around the North Pole, they are longing for our growing consciousness.
—Rumii
... on the 11th the collapse, the news, the silence and confusion. The calm became an internal noise that hasn’t stopped...pain ahead and behind the heart...that’s how it is...
—Washington DC, Rossella Matamoros

2002
What is my race is looking for? Where does it think it’s heading with so much violence? Which path will it follow and what will be its end? I have stood on a street corner to observe my race...
—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros
It is impossible separate the body from the spirit or the sense of intelligence.
—Antonin Artaud

2003
Following my mother’s death, I made many sketches on kitchen paper rolls, some reaching twelve meters long. This work grew as a need to quench the intensity of the moment, until becoming very personal hieroglyphs.

Not knowing where those graphisms were leading me, I worked incessantly for a year and a half. During this period I made a series of “intimate texts” in a structured way, about confusion, emptiness, absence... describing the rites of passage from life to death. Just as the drawing ends with the last stroke, life comes to its end and supervenes emptiness.

Made of personal graphism, archetypal images and punctuation signs, the texts elude what is predictable. Despite their conceptual and reflexive grounds, intuition and emotion are the main characters of this work.

—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros
2004

…transcending, distant, disquiet... disillusion... permanent physical departure, she sought the light, from the moment she knew, from that point on she gave up her physical body to return to her original home... 

—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros

…it is the text, the image and the action in unison, where I seek to dwell. 

—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in the grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense. 

—Rumi


2005

A bridge, an inevitable crossing … a process, thousands of processes that accompanied the final journey beyond to the great lesson/initiation. 

—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros



2006

Entering into the drawing itself by re-contextualizing it, experiencing drawing in another way, moving closer to the primitive experience of drawing with lime or sand. Participating in drawing as a tool for creating a scenic garment... 

—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros



2008

Signsonmymother: A relationship that came from the stars when we traveled in lights, a relationship from the womb, from before, an intense journey with a thousand variants and missions also, with the ritual seal of
life-death-life. 


—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros



2009 

Ah not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner—what is it? If not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of home coming.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Between my eyes and between my arms, I feel the energies of others...my futures. 

—Costa Rica, Rossella Matamoros


2010

My hands, from where vestigial images emerge... all dancing to the beat of thousands of points of view, objective-subjective, all and more. Their force drags those who are not yet here and their light shines in triangular transparency. 

—Costa Rica. Rossella Matamoros

Each and every man has the most precious building in the world in his head, feelings and free will. 

—Joseph Beuys

My art is based on a belief in a universal energy that runs through everything [...]. My works are the irrigation veins of that universal fluid. Through them rises the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulation, unconscious thoughts that animate the world… Above all, there is the search for our origin. 

—Ana Mendieta

Matter is solid because probability patterns are difficult to compress. Life is lots of probability patterns of interconnections. 

—Dialogue Liv Ulman in the film Mind walk

We are all part of one inseparable web of relationships... interdependencies, the well of all living things...feeling the universe,
is an invisible walk... 


—Dialogue Liv Ulman in the film Mind walk

The eternal present, the eternal world… the eternal being. Life and death integrated all in one. What is within, what is without. The beautiful and the monstrous, light and dark, coming and going. The warp and weft, from the ancestral to the instantaneous. 

—Costa Rica. Rossella Matamoros



2011

Ah, but the step of time: think of it as a dream in
what forever remains... all things already rest: darkness and morning light, flower and book.


—Rainer Maria Rilke

To better position myself in the contemporary social and global process, I have set myself the task of investigating different philosophies and cultural and artistic expressions, trying to find the unifying thread and the guiding principle that will allow me to understand the human being in relation to his planet and his universe.

—Costa Rica. Rossella Matamoros


Time. Time lived, time forgotten, time shared. What does time inflict – dust and disintegration? My reminiscences help me live in the present, and I want them to survive. I am a prisoner of my emotions. You have to tell your story, and you have to forget your story. You forget and forgive. It liberates you. 

—Louise Bourgeois



2012

Walk while you have the Light, so that
darkness will not overtake you; he who walks in
the darkness does not know where he goes. While
you have the Light, believe in the Light, so that
you may become sons of Light.


—John 12, 35-36
 



2013

If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear as it is: infinite.


--William Blake 



2014

For within her is a sprit intelligent, holy, unique,
manifold, subtle, mobile, incisive, unsullied, lucid,
invulnerable, benevolent, shrewd, irresistible,
beneficent, friendly to human beings…


—Wisdom 7






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