Time suspended, time stopped, interval and temporality. We no longer want to be conditioned by the chiming of the hours, by a measurable continuum.
Time is interminable, but I choose only “now” like an hourglass without sand, without time. I no longer want to measure the hours, the day. Also because, indeed it is wearying, it would be wearying to know life loses its existentialism every hour.
I do not want to be synchronized, to be a slave to the hands of the clock. I paint them to obliterate them. There is a dictatorship of the clock that characterizes my existence. The existence of time and its problems is a “constituent component of existence”, Heidegger said.
We must take possession of time, stop it, to be able to understand the “authentic sense of the past” if not its “irreversibility”; not the sooner and the later, but the here, suspended and stopped, the silent depths, albeit from time to time.
A time of “still life” meets the time of painting, a painting of the meantime, an executive time, a time of doing. I do not want to exist from when to when, but to stop the locomotive, stop time to be in the world without appointments, absurdly and naively timeless.
I have before me a present time, a time which does not produce new hours; instead, as it is stopped, it talks to me of the past, of a “having been”. It is better to use this interval and use time as a presence. The paradox is that the timelessly of the present is my real time.
Can I recount a time that is stopped?
Communicating in “still” silence.
No-one comes and no-one goes.
With time stopped, suspended, we do not re-start, but we start by finishing. We do not anticipate, we postpone: everything is immediate.
Because going backwards in time, or back, and not inside, even though failure is unstoppable, is obviously inadequate.
Conveying time by way of its instrument.
Catching every sound of a stopped clock… perceiving the presence of “each hour”, even if… immobile.
The time is no longer shown, but the destination is no longer unknown, because it no longer meets the empty gazes of the hours.
Time is suspended, because there is no future.
But I ask myself: have I wasted time or have I lost time itself?
Concetto Pozzati 2008