Pulitzer Winner Nilo Cruz Details Five Artistic Influences

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Nilo Cruz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright known for“El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has highlighted five works of art that he finds empowering and meditative.

Literature and Visual Arts

Cruz expressed admiration for Luis González Palma's photography, particularly the cover image of his 1999 book,“Poems of Sorrow.” He noted the model's gaze, which he interprets as a witness to colonialism rather than a victim, wearing a measuring tape, historically used to measure Indigenous people's heads, like a crown. He described the image as powerful and empowering.

The playwright also keeps José Saramago's 1984 novel,“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” on his nightstand. The book explores philosophical conversations between Fernando Pessoa's fictional persona, Ricardo Reis, and the deceased Pessoa himself. Cruz appreciates how the novel calmly blurs boundaries between author and character, life and afterlife, and invention and memory.

In painting, Cruz frequently returns to Pierre Bonnard, valuing the intimacy and dreamy ambiance in his work. He particularly loves Bonnard's paintings of his wife, Marthe, bathing, such as“Nude in the Bath” (“Nu dans le bain”), 1936. Cruz explained that these works evoke a sense of being immersed in the scene, like an aquarium, fostering contemplation akin to a haiku.

Film and Music

For film, Cruz named Andrei Tarkovsky as a favorite director, adoring all his movies, especially“Stalker,” from 1979. He described the film's journey into“the Zone,” where characters seek their greatest desires, as a search for God. Cruz's perception of spirituality in Tarkovsky's work was confirmed by the director's 1985 book,“Sculpting in Time,” which he considers a“bible for film.”

Finally, Cruz listens to the atmospheric music of composer Max Richter, known for scoring films, while writing. He highlighted Richter's 2015 album,“Sleep,” which has also been presented as an installation where attendees experience the music while lying in beds. Cruz finds the composition's repetition and variation conducive to his writing process, calling it beautiful, ethereal, and meditative.

Source: ARTnews

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