Maybe we’ve overestimated the importance of meaning. Or rather: we’ve overestimated its necessity. Contemporary narrative,whether aimed at a broad audience or a niche one, too often moves within a space where everyone seems to search for a semantic harbor, a safe landing, as if every work were required to say something, and say it well, say it clearly, say it immediately. A kind of sentimental education of meaning that ends up inhibiting what is most fragile, and therefore most precious, in art: what we will call intention.
Intention as a preliminary gesture, a small vibration that makes no claim to be interpreted. A territory that is infinitely more human, less rigid, less colonized by theory. And perhaps for that very reason, so often overlooked: because it is easier to analyze a meaning than to listen to a nuance.
Let us not be misunderstood, interpretation is a respectable game, even a fascinating one. But it is a game that should come after, not before. When interpreters rush in, when they descend upon a work like anxious cartographers eager to draw borders, the risk is suffocating the first breath of thought, that simplicity which is not banality but origin.
And so yes, allow us a small polemic,gentle, almost with a smile: perhaps we need to unlearn something. To let the work present itself not as a riddle to be solved, but as an intention to be recognized. Not the hunt for meaning, but the listening to an inner movement.
An invitation, in short, to slow down. To read less and see more. To resist the urge to fill the silences of art with reassuring explanations, when those silences are often the intention itself, its most sincere and generous form.
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