Book of Hours
 

The Book of Hours is referenced in my piece, Horae. The Lost hour of the day. A brief historical review is given to contextualize this artwork.

The Book of Hours is a catholic prayer book, which appears around mid 1500’s, in Europe. The purpose of this book was to give the lay people a simplified form of the readings the secular office of the church already had. 
This book became so popular that it was the most published book in its times.
In addition to the more or less standard texts of the book of Hours, a great number of accessory texts and prayers were added by their owners. This reveals that owners felt free to insert any number of prayers, sometimes very personal ones. It contained illustrations, which were used as bookmarks to aid the meditative process. These illustrations showed the virgin, saints and sometimes the owners of the books going through the different praying hours. Also reveals something about the mediaeval experience of absorbed prayer, suggesting us the gestures, feelings and inner thoughts of the perfect prayer. 
The specific place where each book was made is recognizable due to the specifications about the work of the land for that particular region. The calendar offered guidance and sanitary advice, for each season. In each month we will find specific health recommendations. Also in most of the books we will find  that the artist and/or the printer is identified at the end.
The principal subject of the Book of Hours is the prayers to the Virgin. 
The book includes a liturgical calendar use to find the important festive days, the office of the dead, penitential psalms, litanies and sometimes other religious matters are added.

Composition of the book of hours

- Calendar
- Gospel lessons
- Hours of the Virgin
- Hours of the Holy Spirit
- Prayers to the Virgin, Obsecro (beseech, implore, conjure), O intemerata
   (Unviolated, inviolate, uncorrupted)
- Penitential psalms and Litany
- Office of the dead
- Suffrages
Hours where to recite the prayers

The prayers to the Virgin are to be recited in seven different times during the day. All these praying times followed the canonical hours, based on the rule or canon of the church, which indicates when the clergy has to pray. This division of the day respects the Roman’s calendar where the first hour of light it is considered the first hour of the day, one-day time is about 12 hours.

- Day break    Matins and Lauds 
- At 6 am    Prime (the first, the beginning)
- At 9 am    Terce (three, third hour)
- At noon    Sexte (sixth) 
- At 3 pm    None (ninth)
- Sunset    Vespers (evening)
- Evening    Compline

Each praying hour includes psalms, hymns, canticles (liturgical songs derived from the Bible), lessons (readings from the Bible, found only in matins), prayers (orationes) and little chapters (capitula).

For the nobility and the emerging urban middle class of the middle ages and early renaissance the Book of Hours was not only a way of being closer to god outside the church at home, in private chapels or chambers, but also a valuable possession. It is an hereditary family value. The owners of the books often have their coats-of-arms included in the illustrations. 

Horae: Latin plural of hour
The lost hour of the day: is the hour that we always wish to have, it is that perfect, desirable hour that doesn’t exist.

Not being a religious person, the compelling feeling to do a book, which relates to the Christian prayer books, as it is the Book of Hours, took me by surprise.
What was my attachment? What kind of clues I was looking for?
I think that the spirit of the book of hours is what engaged me. Meditation, intimacy, timelessness and private worlds are, for me, ideas related to this book. I consider books as a place out of reality, a space we can merge ourselves and forget about the external world. Books give us the opportunity to manage the motion of perception; we control the rate and even the sequence of the information transferred from the book in our hands. In other words a book is a sequence of spaces and since each of these spaces is perceived at a different time is a sequence of moments.
I have found in the repetition of the ritual of praying an analogy to my own art practice, my ritualistic way of doing prints. Through the process of creating this book I have become conscious about my art practice, establishing relationships between past and present works, and realizing that my present work is the next step of my previous one.
Horae is an artwork, which made my go beyond the creation of prints. It is a conjunction of prints, texts, object and context. The complexity of this piece is a new step in my art practice.

The piece is composed of a book, a lectern and a specific environment. 
The book contains 25 prints, which came out of 75 monotypes made from the same etched steel plate. There was a self-restriction of colors together with a standard paper size. Each of the prints is referencing different states of mind and/or different times of a 25 hours’ day. The order of the images in the book does not represent the original sequence in which they were created. Horae is not a documentation of my creative process, rather it is a metaphor of what I’ve learned while creating the images. The last print of the book, the lost hour of the day is an illuminated print. The light that comes through the embossed print is the metaphoric representation of my own desire, my perfect unreachable lost hour.

In the Book of Hours the text is accompanied by some images that functioned as bookmarks. In Horae the relation between text and image is completely reversed because is the text  which functions as breaks.
Horae is divided in four main chapters, The hours of Light, The hours of Semi-Light, The hours of Non-Light and the hours of Freedom. The text that accompanies some images is referencing the prays to the Virgin: Deep inside, Inmaculata, Pure, I had a dream, The triumph of death and Awaken. 
The cover of the book carries on top the original steel plate. The etched image of the plate is composed of a single gesture created with a brush. I identify this abstract gesture as a personae who passes through the 25 hours of this day. The figure on the plate has been polished in order to subtlety reflect the image of the viewer while sitting in front of the closed book. This was made in order to reinforce the idea of identification of the figure as oneself.
The small size of the print speaks about the intimacy, individuality and privacy that the act of reading, praying or creating carries with it. The spotlight focuses the viewer on the book by creating a semi-dark environment. 
The lectern references the conventional church pews, the pulpits and also the scholars old fashion desks acting as a metaphor of the concept of learning, praying and meditating.
The material of the lectern is plexiglass and not wood as it should be a Gothic lectern, this adds a contemporary view about an ancient subject. 
The contemporary issues that this piece addresses are consciousness, complexity and intertextuality. Posmodern era is characterized by a heightened consciousness, as  stated before, Horae makes me conscious about my place and the relative position of everything we do. The complexity resides in the multiplicity of levels of readings. This work references not only private, individual and intimate spaces such as home, but also social, religious and cultural spaces such as church, library and school. The intertexuality is based on two ideas that come across in the work: the Book of Hours in which Horae is based, is a textbook. My reinterpretation is an image book searching a common meaning with the prayer book, and the reference to system of belief. Also, Horae, breaks with the idea of mass media manufactured artist’s books, so popular in the 60’s, by being a single unit, completely made by the artist. It refers also to reproduction, on another level, by being a single plate printed over and over again.