Horacio Reyes Páez
A film director and photographer who captures the stillness of a movement with his camera lens
With your work, you capture the stillness of a movement; when did you first observe the idea of stillness? You know, because many tend to focus on motion rather than stillness, especially in this fast-moving world.
Movement is always there, also in stillness. What is beautiful about stillness is that it invites the viewer to take a moment of pause. Then, through meditative contemplation of the world, we start to find movement, even where nothing seems to be happening. To be able to contemplate the subtle movements of the universe is a way to go deeper into the origin of things, into the mysteries of the world. Large movements are just a consequence of smaller movements, pure, subtle movements.
Your work has a unique aesthetic; it reflects the language of nature. So, when you create a film or music, do you become one with it? And if so, how do you return to the real world?
I think every human being has their authentic language. To get in touch with this deeper self, diving through all the layers that take us further away from who we truly are, is what I think is our biggest mission: To let our true soul speak what it has to speak in this life we have. Being in the real world is being side-by-side with our true selves. An artificial world is the one we build to fit something external, a standard that we do not define, but by someone or something else. I believe we can own our freedom and our lives. When we move and act according to what we really are, we’ll live in the real world.
My rule is that all of my work has to align with this authentic connection with myself; if I cannot follow that rule, I stop. I reflect and decide to move in a different direction until I find a road that is true for me. When I create, I try to be transparent with what I feel and what my intuition tells me.
In a world deluged between the past and future, your work holds them to the present and lets them focus on the unnoticed beauty. What has been your inspiration in this journey all along?
My greatest inspiration has always been the pursuit of beauty in everything I see or experience. I do not define beauty as something that looks “aesthetically correct”, matches an external academic definition of beauty, or even has “matching colours”. For me, beauty is organic and belongs to the natural breathing of nature and the Universe. For me, the ultimate form of beauty is what is spiritual. Why is nature so genuinely beautiful? Why is it so perfectly created? Why do flowers match their shape with the stars and the cosmos? Why do the rhythms of the year perfectly connect with the dance of the planets and the stars? There is a higher order in all things, and everything “micro” on earth correlates to what is “macro” in the Universe. Unfortunately, we humans unconsciously broke this connection. Now, through consciousness, we need to heal and bond again with this rhythm and start reading an unwritten but alive language. It is invisible for our ordinary senses but powerfully visible – if we train them – to our heart and intuition.
For me, beauty is recognising the spiritual origin of all things in Creation and tracking this with the camera. So, I am constantly chasing a spiritual manifestation that has materialised in this world and is speaking to us, telling us about the invisible worlds.
The characters you choose for your films all have a distinct quality, merging entirely with the music, the surroundings and the words. So how do you select these artists?
I don’t look for excellent curricula. I love to see committed artists. Artists who need – as if it were to breathe – to get exposed because they want to express themselves from the heart, which is almost a life or death experience. I love to see courage in the eyes of an artist, this fire of transformation that can build a story. At the same time, performance artists should be in control of their bodies and technique. Training and research are absolutely essential. Mistakes during a set, in a film or on stage are typical; I think losing time is a lack of commitment. Commitment and courage are what I most appreciate from other artists.
What is Art for you?
For me, Art is the language of the spiritual on earth.
‘The main pursuit is to achieve poetic and powerful artistic insight,’ how did you realise this will be the purpose in your creations?
What I love about poetry is that it doesn’t respond to pragmatic or materialistic logic. Poetry is the collision of signs, symbols, and words. Poetry is the only way humans can achieve a new level of cognition through the heart and not through the mind alone. Poetry brings a new value to the comprehension of life, a spiritual comprehension of life.
