Work in process
and to dust you shall return.
BPS - Sahara sand, graphite and titanium dioxide on linen. 130 x 81 cm.
Wandering through this immense desert, day after day I camp wherever I am when the magical hour of twilight approaches. The deep blues give way to reds, lilacs, grays, and black. In the most profound solitude I have ever known, I prepare my dinner, listen to my music, write, and contemplate the most majestic and bewildering of all skies, which crushes me down on Earth and fills me with a deep sense of insignificance. Like every grain of sand in this vast desert, how tiny and insignificant we are in the Cosmos.
Algeria, December 1988
ETHER - audiovisual installation for 4 slide projectors, light and smoke, projected onto
the painting "My plans". 5.2 x 1.95 m.
ETHER
From Latin æthēr and Greek aithēr: sky, firmament, the pure and bright air above.
In Sanskrit "akasha", the fifth element, the space in which everything exists, which does not have the firmness of the earth, the freshness of water, the heat of fire, nor the movement of air...
The Luminiferous Ether, which the ancients believed to fill the entire dark cosmos and allow light to travel. The very essence of void.
Void, in which I find myself, and leads me to the unanswerable question... “the primordial nothingness”, prior to matter, to energy and to everything we have understood or invented. “The nothingness” that redeems me, that places me in my condition of dust, into which everything shall return. That shows me the nonsense of the whole and the whole sense of my brief existence, at peace with our smallness, with our irrelevance, our finitude and free from the search for eternity.
Khumbu, December 2024