“Timaeus” – a work in progress
“Timaeus” – A series of 8 panel paintings (part 1)
The world is a fascinating place. For an artist who started his adult life as a student of philosophy it is very difficult to lay aside the lens that continuously colours and adjusts the way he perceives this world.
Some time during the last year I was off and on working on different projects, writing texts and planning for new initiatives when I started doodling on drawing paper. It was something between an exercise in ‘écriture automatique’ and conscious matching of shapes, symbols and meaning. I traced the images that emerged in India ink with relatively heavy lines. Then I started to colour the drawing with gouache, using a flat style, avoiding indications of shading and depth.
I continued this exercise on other days, creating a small series of – sometimes unfinished – coloured drawings. At that time I was also considering creating a series of paintings that could be displayed on a wall as a horizontal series or tiled in any order the owner wishes, creating her or his own narrative. So I decided to purchase 8 identical wooden panels of 50 x 50 cm and started preparing them.
At the same time I was analysing the gouaches and discovered that they could be read as a slightly unordered way to ‘read’ the world from a perspective which I can only label as ‘slightly platonic’. Slightly, because there is no strict application of platonic ideas or a literal translation of images derived from Plato’s dialogues, which a have always enjoyed reading. But there is a pervading sense that the notions, as we find them in the later dialogues, like the Timaeus and the Critias, are instrumental in the constructing the images, albeit in a somewhat chaotic way.
To be continued…
