The four seasons have followed the order set by humanity. We've definitely been abandoned, I think as I fold the chunky sweaters I haven't needed this year either. I put away my coats in silence and feel that kind of small sorrow that connects us to childhood. Another winter without much cold, a spring devoid of raincoats and umbrellas.
The aesthetic narration of the landscape has been interrupted and I feel as my own the orphanhood of those pieces that have left and entered a bag without seeing the sky. Its function has been cancelled; they have stopped participating in our stage, and we have not been able to count on them despite the fact that they have an impeccable cut. We have not walked its beauty.
We look for candles that smell of the countryside after it rains and turn to the classics, Vivaldi, or the painter Cy Twombly to remember the four seasons and perceive the contrast between the cold, the humidity, the heat or the breeze, sensations that are increasingly erased of subtlety due to the climate catastrophe. In Twombly's painting dedicated to winter, the words – present in the other seasons – evaporate under a white mist and the scarce yellow that hangs from a dark green makes us shiver with a deadly cold.
The Virginia-born artist signed it at the end of the 20th century, but the atmosphere seems ancestral, as unreal as the artistic composition of his Baroque predecessor, Nicolas Poussin.
This one wanted to reflect the prodigious power of nature: "Benign in the spring, rich in the summer, gloomy fertile in the autumn and cruel in the winter". Commissioned by the Duke of Richelieu, he conceived the work as a philosophical reflection on the natural order through scenes from the Old Testament. Like Twombly, he painted it in Rome, and in his biographies it is noted that he was afflicted with a tremor of the hands. The two artists faced the colossal challenge of defining the cycles of life, and they certainly never imagined that this cosmology would be exhausted.
The changing landscape began to be threatened with death in the 1980s. Bruno Latour explains it very well in Habitar la Terra (Arcadia): everything related to the climate had ceased to be a deductive science, as the old philosophers claimed, on the contrary, it had become a science "made of physics, chemistry, of numerous models and algorithms, and at the same time they depend on buoys in the ocean, satellites, geological samples”.
With all this information, it was announced that the unstoppable increase in CO2 would increase the temperature of the planet. And despite the conflicting data, no one wanted to believe it and even less the ambition of the big world. Environmental experts were petrified while a creed of exaggeration, even fake news, spread among politicians and statesmen.
Children's voices emerged, perhaps claiming in the age of innocence could be more convincing. Greta Thunberg ended up being hated for her vehemence, as annoying as her journeys on long-distance trains across Europe, in an era where speed is the watchword!
Francisco Vera, a thirteen-year-old Colombian boy, occupies the television sets these days about the desertification of Doñana. He claims that he became aware of the climate crisis when the Amazon burned, and invites us all to be activists for the climate.
They are young people who do not lose hope that adults stop stealing spring and winter from them; they don't want to be expropriated from the four seasons.
