This week we have the partnership of Enrique Lopez, former student of Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). In this article he will demonstrate that art is naturalness and beauty.

Art is the expression of the heart. Precisely because the heart is the only one that expresses itself. The reason means, it adapts thought to reality, it discovers truths, it unveils them. The body, the sensitive soul, is a passive receptacle of material exteriorities. The external senses, from sight to touch, are its instruments. On the other hand, the sensitive soul -not sensitive: sensitive- is that 'place' where one's own factions dwell. That is the feeling. Unlike the sensation, shared, coming from the external senses, the feeling is private and derives from the internal senses -mainly from the report and the imagination-. It is what we call the heart! The heart is the feeling, which is something much, much bigger, much deeper than the sensation. Sensation creates emotions. The heart harbors feelings. The heart, by means of the report, saves what has happened, the experiences, the people who pass by our side; it keeps in mind what it considers most important; it perpetuates - making it its own - what it loves, in spite of the distance or the disappearance of the loved one. The heart weighs, gives its weight to each thing, measuring its transcendence and its value. Amor meus, pondus meum, said St. Augustine, my love is my weight! To weigh comes precisely from that, from pondus, from weight. The Scriptures narrate how the Virgin Mary was often silent and "kept all things in her heart"; how she was making her son's life her own; how, at final, she was loving him. To love is to feel as one's own the life of the beloved and to want to perpetuate that feeling.

Love is born from the deepest part of the person, which is his or her heart, and it develops and is strengthened by a firm desire to nourish this feeling. It could be said, then, that love begins to germinate in the heart and is built in the will; it begins with a deep feeling and proliferates with desire. Hence it is common to identify the expression 'I love you' with the expression 'I love you'. Illusions also flow from the heart: with the imagination, the ship of creativity sets sail, always hand in hand with what has been lived, with what is loved. To undertake a project with another person is something that comes from the heart and is then elaborated by reason. But it is the heart that gives rise to it!

That is why feelings are not signified - to signify is to define (hence the word 'meaning'): feelings are expressed. sample is the importance of gestures, which could be considered the bodily expressions of the heart, when it comes to really getting to know someone. A person can say that he is perfectly fine, but if he expresses the opposite with his eyes, there is little or nothing he can do to prevent others from noticing his regret.

Having made this prolegomenon, the reader will be predisposed to understand what I want to point out. Look at what a beautiful reality: the poet, the sculptor, the painter are, it could be said, egregious expressors of what is most properly individual. While the philosopher or the scientist deals with common objects, the artist deals with what is subjective and proper, with what is inalienable, with what is intrinsically inaccessible to the 'other'. While those who go to the same restaurant enjoy the same culinary pleasures, the artist drags himself across the page, trying to write down something of what is in the most intimate part of his soul.

The artist enjoys so much what he feels, what he carries inside, that he feels the need to make it known. He is passionate about life -about the deepest and most profound part of life, which is 'his' life- who uses an unequaled gift to express that fervor. The artist's weight is his whole being; and that holistic weight, that inscrutable pondus, results in something goal -a painting, a poem, a novel, a symphony- that manages to transmit that which a priori is presented as impossible to transmit, that manages to make the 'other' see a bit, a little bit, of the most intimate and inaccessible part of his being. The artist is the soul of subtle feelings that knows how to enjoy the little and delight in the much, and that, enjoying the little and delighting in the much, achieves through a work, something extrinsic to himself, that a third party participates in those feelings.

It is, therefore, in people with a great heart where that passionate impetus, that artistic and creative vein is most strongly present. The well conceived passion -not the one distorted by the uneducated contemporaneity- is source of inner life. The passive is that which is born unintentionally, that which arises suddenly and moves the spirit. The passion of the body -which I call external passivity- is bad if it is not controlled, but that of the heart... -oh, that of the heart- is always beautiful and very powerful, pure projected indefinition, pure longing to engender. I call this last internal passion.

Plato said that to love is to engender in beauty. That volition, that desire that sinks its roots in the feeling of the heart and with irrepressible impulse shoots towards an exciting future -whether it results in an artistic work or in a large family- is precisely the yearning to "beget in beauty". This is what people in love, for example, feel, but also artists. The lover and the artist act, if you stop to think about it, in a very similar way: both discover a feeling, an inner reverberation of incalculable joy, which is born in the heart and, convincingly, urges them to act, which ignites their wills and points them to the expression, the development and the care of what they feel.

In view of all this, and in conclusion, it should be understood that, although I will devote myself much more assiduously to the use of reason, it is in my poetic work where my deepest truths will be expressed; where, in short, there will always be a greater portion of myself. Because it is in art that what is most proper to man is expressed, where that great unknown that we call the heart is expressed.

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