Passage to the Light / a Retrospective to the Future
Thirty-something years ago, at a time when I was still struggling through my apprenticeship in reality – learning to paint what I saw, the visible – temptations of the invisible began to beckon me. I had finished art school, and it was now up to me alone to decide what to do. I painted. In other words, I manipulated darkness to render light. What else, after all, is painting? Drawing and colours, shadow and light. But what light? What is light? Is it merely tones
and shades? Is that enough? Is light simply a trick to convey the image of the world? A chromatic quality, a tonal gradation, a plastic value? An achievement? Or is light itself the true pursuit? A deeper necessity, a phototropism, a path, a direction. “See the light, you hear? Don’t lose sight of the light.” This repeated paternal admonition became my enduring legacy. Ever since, kneeling in the darkness, I have been searching for light. “Light is not a goal,” he would say. “If you stare directly at the sun, you’ll go blind. If you try to touch the fire, you’ll melt. Like Icarus, you’ll fall, you’ll burn. Your art is useless, your craft is vain if you cannot protect yourself. The necessity is not to reach the light, but to be illuminated – to see what is happening around you, to bring order to the disorderly, to gather yourself, to become light, transparent, enlightened – so you may be saved.” But how can you understand fire if you don’t touch it and burn? How can you truly feel the light of the sun if you don’t look straight at it and go blind? Conflicting thoughts but I surrendered – how could I not? – to the temptations of the invisible. In The Parable of the Olive Tree (1993), I sought to depict its ultimate offering – the immaterial essence – the leaf-shaped flame that surrenders its oil to the vigil lamps. In The Offering (1997), I sought to convey another kind of material spirituality – flesh and blood in another form: bread, oil, and wine. “The Spirit blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” In The Impassable Forest (2004), I sought to turn the dark shadow of a human body into an illuminated one. I reached out to grasp the fire, only to seize burning coal – hot, black, and searing with pain. There, from within the forest, I saw for the first time the passage to the light.
In The Bare Essentials (2013), a luminous gash – a half-open door – a purification, soap and water to make ourselves presentable, a pure white towel to restore a clear face to the relentless mirror staring back at us. Then, a heap of beeswax candles, slender votive tapers, undying flames – days and nights of multicoloured darkness illuminated. Painted and unpainted at once, matter touched, its decay alive. And now the time has come – an auspicious coincidence – for them to congregate within the Venetian Basilica of Saint Mark in Heraklion, Crete. A palimpsest of cultures, intertwined, resurrected, altered in the empty space, yet always leaving traces of that strange otherness we still venerate within it, awkward and thirsting. Suspended. Our position wavers, unsteady, ever fleeting – surrendered to the wind and the stillness alike. Life is but a breath, as is truth, the day, the night, eternity… our path toward the light.
… After the tour, a little girl came up to me—she wanted to ask me something. She told me she liked to draw, that she enjoyed sketching with a pencil. She could make things look just like what she saw in front of her, but – “You see,” she said, “I struggle a bit with light. How do I render it?”, “With darkness,” I told her. “You hold the pencil in your hand. To render light on your paper, you must shape the darkness around it. You will wrestle with the darkness. The light will come on its own.” Later, I wondered – was that spontaneous reaction a lesson in art or life?
