Editorial, August 2025

On the Quiet Imposition of Meaning

We do not always choose the themes that shape an issue. Sometimes they arrive like wounds we did not know we carried. This one emerged in fragments: a silent pouring, a scratched-out gaze, a girl mistaken for dead, a face lost in fog. The works assembled here watch, and endure, and ask us to consider how meaning is given form, and at what cost.

On the cover, a woman in profile. Her posture is still, almost ceremonial, and her white dress hangs like a sentence waiting for its verb. But her eyes have been struck through, one red slash, precise and punishing. A correction, perhaps, or a condemnation. The painting is titled Well Done, and the sarcasm is barely contained. This is discipline disguised as praise, what happens when seeing itself becomes unacceptable.

We live in a time of loud impositions: manufactured truths, shouted interpretations, meaning twisted into slogans and stripped of nuance. The works in this issue resist that noise. They offer a quieter kind of imposition, deliberate and full of consequence. They do not escape the world but engage it, in its rawness, its uncertainty, its unresolved histories.

Mike Adams paints the landscape as testimony rather than scenery. His tonal fields do not perform beauty so much as remember it. The trees lean forward, the skies press down, and the paintings hold their meaning as questions in open space rather than declarations.

Margit J. Füderer's paintings are the nerve center of this issue. Her work scratches through surfaces, through flesh, through time. Words appear and vanish. Figures are wrapped, restrained, radiant, erased. She does not make portraits; she stages exorcisms, and her women stand as sites of memory, resistance, and transformation.

Lisa Sorgini's photographs turn inward, toward the domestic, but there is nothing soft in her gaze. She captures the labor of caregiving, the repetition, the intimacy edged with exhaustion, and she neither sentimentalizes it nor looks away. She finds the heroism in what usually goes overlooked.

The two stories by Jorge Maestre Martí unfold like prayers interrupted. In Five Minutes, a woman speaks to her dying husband with fury and love, with the need to say what has gone unsaid for years; the story is a reckoning, a letting go not of grief but of silence. In The Dream, death hovers like fog, pushed aside for a moment by breath, by memory, by a dream that insists on life. These are stories of return rather than resolution.

This issue also begins a new section, Reviews, where we open space for reflection on exhibitions, books, and performances. These are not academic critiques but acts of close attention, responses shaped by care and curiosity and the belief that meaning deepens through conversation.

And still the question remains: how is meaning imposed, and by whom? María Zambrano wrote that "only through love and death does the truth appear". This issue lingers in that thin space where love is compromised and death speaks in riddles, where art becomes a site for refusal rather than answers.

To look at the cover again is to feel something like an accusation. The red line is surgical, decisive. It tells you something was seen that should not have been, or worse, that something was not seen, and the price is this. We are asked, gently and without escape, to decide whether we will look anyway.

This is what remains, and it is enough.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume, Editor-in-Chief

© Margit J. Füderer