"Beauty is not a substance in itself but only a drawing of shadows", Junichiro Tanizaki wrote. The postminimalism of the 21st century is a play of shadows. The tonal systems of the past, their harmonic, melodic and rhythmic structures, based on geometrizations and sound tensions that were supposed to build times and spaces, found in Western postcolonial minimalist thought, the essential aphorism.

These shadows derived from centuries of accumulation in our modern way of listening seem to lead us to fatuity. Perhaps for this reason minimalist thought sought in Eastern philosophy and non-Western knowledge what it understood as "formulas" to appropriate, once again, with the presumption that such reduction to essentials was possible. The dogma of the Western ratio was revealed in its fatuity before the "absence" and the "shadow" cultivated by sound knowledge and surviving listeners who were not reducible to the systems of academic composition. In 4:33 (1952) and in his essay Silence (1961), John Cage manifests having become aware of this fatuity.

Morton Feldman, in a dialogue with painter Brian O' Doherty, wrote: "A music that has surface builds with time. A music that has no surface submits to time and becomes a rhythmic progression." The black paintings in the Rothko Chapel come close for me to the vibrational sensation that a music in such terms could give us. Feldman looks not to non-Western knowledge but to painting for answers to think sonically about the fatuous ratio that persists in compositional systems, namely: controlling time, turning sound into an idea.

The current pianistic postminimalism draws heavily from Ambient music, this is how it tries to build surfaces. We hear it in popular figures such as Max Richter, Hania Arani, Olafur Arnalds or Nils Frahm. In the Silencios Fatuos (2021) by Colombian composer Julián De La Chica, this search seems to find threads that weave with the phosphorescent and radioactive shadows left by the twentieth century, and to which we return when listening to the flashes of sonorities that refer us to Ryuichi Sakamoto or David Sylvian.

In previous productions, such as the Preludes Op. 8, and his Voyeuristic Images Op. 10, De La Chica's pianism shows a constant exploration and research. The composer-pianist urges within the parameters of the "new simplicity", challenging himself in a kind of minimal eroticism.

In Silencios fatuos the artist gradually sheds his skins, confronting the very fatuity of postminimalism. And in this way, he seems to sprout abstaining from any violent rebellion, in a kind of superfluity, allowing the passage of time, building surfaces with curved lines that twist on themselves without noise, without groans, contemplating the absurd with an unsettling serenity.

Susan Campos-Fonseca, PhD
Musicologist & composer