It was that day when I realized all that life that exists behind things, and a force incredibly benevolent made me know that there is nothing to fear about; never.

Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world; I feel I cannot take it…and then my heart is about to collapse."

This is a short monologue taken from American Beauty, from the precise moment when the main character wants to conquer the girl and shows her the most beautiful movie he has ever made. ¿And what was it? A plastic bag whirling by the wind in a silent winter day.

But behind those fifteen minutes was the eternity of beauty. There was a much bigger force, good and lovely. So big and beautiful, so fortunate, that there was nothing to fear about.

Marcela Pittner’s paintings are similar to that bag. Simple situations that could be described with few words. A window that slightly shows the outline of a woman. A coat hanger with a lightened lamp. A lighthouse cut on a cloudy sky.

At the end of the fifteenth century, in Japan new form of poetry was born, the haiku. It has a descriptive argument: a light illuminates a scene placed -almost always- in a landscape. Mountains, rivers, birds and flowers seen in different seasons of the year are chained with various feelings. In each one of Marcela’s paintings, a haiku seems to hide. Each painting is an attempt of freezing for an instant the continuous flowing of the universe and the emotions of him, who watches with eyes recently opened.

Marcela respects the traditional techniques of painting. She does not need innovation. The rose, which she paints next to a blue cup, may be a ‘death nature’, but it is something else. For the Middle Age man nothing was in itself, everything was part of something much bigger. The rose was something more than a name. Behind it was Truth, with capital letters. Today modern men (not all of them) have lost this ability to perceive what is sacred. Because this is how it must be done, with a refined intuition, leaving reason aside and putting the heart in front.

Each of Marcela’s paintings is an invitation to recover the symbolic capacity, the ability to see further away from what the eye can see. Each picture is the story of an emotion, of a state of mind rooted in the artist’s life. None of the images are there randomly.

The painting is contemplated in a few seconds; a few minutes would take a more generous observer with its time. Making it, preparing the canvas, drawing the outlines and finishing the colouring has taken time, may be a few months.

But a whole life crosses over each centimeter of canvas. Each image is the result of a series of experiences. Each picture is the visible point of a long invisible track. Not everybody will be able to see that track, only those that tune the same spiritual frequency.

American Beauty’s main character says that in the world there is a lot of beauty. It is true. But it is not less true that only well prepared spirits may be able to perceive it. And there is something else, from all those spirits there are some, a few, that know that beauty is barely the mask of an "incredibly benevolent force".

Marcela Pittner offers us an instant of beauty in a pictorial language. It depends of the observer, if he risks perceiving something else.