Every day we hear (but, do we listen?) and see (but, do we feel?) the horrors happening around us: wars, attacks, terrorism, rapes, murders, massacres, injustice, abuse, flee… where to? famine… deaths… I also hear and see it, but I listen and feel it. The scene is always the same one: the lamb and the slaughter-man: reviving a Passion every day.

All this takes me to recall the Passion of Our Lord, the great mystery of death and Resurrection, asking myself constantly why God sent his own Son to die for us and to offer us Eternal Life.

What do we do to deserve for a whole God, made man, to sacrifice himself to save us? How do explain to that same God, who knows everything, what is going on here? How do we justify the millions of children that die of hunger? Do we tell him that we used to shout before but now, hoarse, we only have the cry of prayer? Had the Passion of Our Lord a raison d’être?... I think it had. How could it not! It was the same Son of the Father the one that died for us at the Cross.

The word Passion has always been hammering in my mind, especially in these last years, and I have often closed my eyes to imagine, with my limitations, the events that happened two thousand years ago. One day, this painter had the idea of making a voyage in time and recall with lines and blots of colour the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ seen and understood in this 21st century; and that is how the Passion was born in Rando’s painting.

My Passion… wants to exit the darkness and enter the Light of Hope, the Light of Resurrection, the Light of Joy, the Light of the lights, which is the Light of Love.

God loved us so much that he sent us his Son to die for us all… but as the Son was God, he rose; and that is precisely what I want it to happen in my Passion: Jesus Christ coming down from the Cross and that we never ever take him up again, that He will not let be crucified, that the Cross remains as a symbol of Christendom, but empty, that this message of Hope realized in life and not of death, reaches the world and the Church (we all are Church), that this Passion becomes Life, becomes Love.

Let us all exit darkness! Let us all go back to the Light of Love!
Let us make the cries of protest become cries of prayer, but… with our eyes open!

As a painter, I have always expressed that paintings have their own life and that, when the artist gives the final brushstroke to the canvas, his mission is over and the work becomes autonomous and it only belongs to the “paintings looker”. Maybe this is why I do not like to give titles to my paintings, nor explaining them in so as to not influence at all in the painting-looker dialogue; let them understand and interpret each other with no external interference, not even the artist’s one.

And I finish by remembering myself and recalling that the only Creator is God… and we, the ones that we are here, we can only recreate; and if we let ourselves be guided by Him, maybe, we will manage to do something that could be called Work of Art.

Jorge Rando, Malaga, March 2008