Xavier Rubert de Ventos. Two notes for a clever way to think about ourselves

29/01/2023. [BCN] Spain
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA

Xavier Rubert de Ventós has passed away at the age of 83 in a Barcelona hospital, a key philosopher, thinker and writer of our postmodernity, characterized by an agile thought, presented with humor and sharpness. The obvious link between him and architecture would be created by the hand of Oriol Bohigas, assuming the chair of Aesthetics at the Barcelona School of Architecture.

Born in Barcelona in 1939, Xavier Rubert de Ventós graduated in Law in Barcelona in 1961, and in 1962 he completed his last year of Philosophy in Madrid, where he would become a friend and disciple of José Luis López Aranguren (who was expelled from his chair in Madrid and made the trip to the United States) would also move to the other side of the Atlantic where he would teach at Berkeley and later at Harvard as a Santayana Fellow.

Presentation of the AnyWay Congress in Barcelona 1993. Shot from the AnyWay video, image courtesy of CCCB

Presentation of the AnyWay Congress in Barcelona 1993. Shot from the AnyWay video, image courtesy of CCCB

Image from the Mies on Scene video. Image courtesy of Nihao Films / Fundació Mies van der Rohe

At thirty-six years old, he was already an indisputable figure in his field and one of the indisputable authors of the construction of criticism in the seventies and eighties. His extraordinary career as a professor at different universities, and his initiative,s with Eugenio Trias, Jordi Llovet and Josep Ramoneda, creating the Barcelona College of Philosophy in 1976 with which, through free access conferences, they bet on Philosophy being more everyday His interest in diffusion made him a collaborator of the newspaper "El País", and he always responded positively to spread the Aesthetics in different radio, television or congress events.

1. Among these congresses, it stands out that he was chosen by Ignasi de Sola Morales and Josep Ramoneda as a figure to present the Anyway Congress in 1993, he would not disappoint, placing himself after his initial thanks simply as:

"Saint John the Baptist for whom I announce, for those who are to come later, I would be the Saint John the Baptist of what is to come."

and taking as reference Kant as the first classic and modern:

"for discovering that the new territory is subjectivity, that the new territory is the individual... and at the same time maintains the classic sense of the limit."

And remember, more or less, one of his phrases:

"The greatest greatness of a man is the fact of facing questions that he knows that he will not be able to answer and that he also knows that he will not be able to stop asking himself."

His bibliography, more than thirty works translated into eight languages, carries out an interesting introspection into one of his passions and identity, Aesthetics: "The self-absorbed art", "Theory of sensitivity", "Aesthetics and its heresies", "Of the modernity".

2. Irony and intelligence are not usually popular, they place the interlocutor in an uncomfortable position, so in the end, they would be labelled and their commitment or drift towards non-nationalist independence (I would affirm repeatedly), for some it would be a logical consequence, and for others the response to being treated as a foreigner in Madrid during his political participation. Be that as it may, something that is indifferent to me to remind him, his passion for playing with thought and his lucidity were still intact when he participated in the filming of "Mies on Scene" by Nihao Films for the Fundació Mies van Der Rohe.

Xavier Rubert de Ventós presented the filming after random comments from anonymous viewers, ironically declared:

What is this? Is it a spa?
Is it a gym? Is it a zoo of tiny African animals?

We are before Mies.

Like Leonardo with the painting of Christ.

It is true that you do not associate it with anything. It is an impression in itself.

The closing of said filming would also be carried out by him, linked to the statement used at the beginning of the exhibition that can be visited at the Museo Del Prado on the work of Fernando Zóbel «in order to know how to paint, you must first know how to look. And by looking you learn” with the following comment:

He lives on tiptoes / Îl vit sur la pointe des pieds

Well, sometimes I have found myself in the Pavilion with people on tiptoe. Not for not dirtying, no, on cultural tiptoes. Guessing if it's good, instead of letting you sit in one of those Barcelona chairs and... Well no, people who don't know, because only if you're educated can you say something because of what it looks like, what it contrasts with, what it anticipates … It's hard to look without this type of support.

Do we kill it?
No, we have many more things still!
Oysters man…