Life After...

Paul opened his eyes as the first sun rays hit the framed poster hanging on the wall. Facing it was a narrow window, a little to the left, behind an old fashioned bed occupying almost half of the room. The stream of light that left the sun precisely eight minutes ago would travel the last eight feet of its voyage apparently unaware of the life-giving magic  that it was about to perform.  Paul, the consequential creation of that magical act gained awareness of the moment as the first wave of photons crossed the room. The effect triggered by the reflection wouldn’t last long, but by now it became a morning ritual when the bouncing light would land on Karen’s retina, making the pastel colors of the hanging print the first thing she would see opening her eyes. “Castle and Sun” was the title -  a world filled with dreams, music and poetry. ”A mysterious concoction of Surreal blended with Cubist elements, seducing the eye with a child’s playful exuberance”…  – at least that’s how it was described in the Sotheby’s catalog where she first spotted it. Paul knew about it because the catalog has been lying on the night table for weeks after Karen decided to order on line the print. However, the image in the catalog has been enough to bring him around again and again and introduce him gradually into the private world of his new life-giver. His presence in Karen’s room was hard to define in plain words. He was kind of all over the place but his vision was carried by his hostess’ eyes so his trajectories were linked to her routines. This morning the light was brilliant and vibrant and Paul managed to get closer to see better the delicate lines and the subtle color combinations that made his painting so appealing. He was stunned by the quality of the prints these days. Details could be seen down to an almost tactile perception. The intricate composition was probably the reason Karen picked up this particular piece for the bedroom. Often her gaze would wander in a dream-like state through the endless imaginary rooms of the Castle, inhabited by deep colors and hues, a labyrinth where light gets lost and forgets its unperishable nature. She installed one of those special lamps to  look at this surreal  world even after the rest of the house was drowned in darkness. She would doze off while the bouncing messages loaded with myriads of stories dissimulated into colors would travel down from the print on the wall through the barely open eye lashes to find coherence under her eyelids. Paul remembered how in the same dream-like state, facing a similar narrow window overlooking the forever gray skyline of his adoptive city, he traced the first lines of his imaginary castle.  Munich was one of those
 choices that come to you on a silver tray, but without a weather forecast. The teaching job allowed him to experiment, methodically with a wide range of painting techniques and materials. Looking at it closer Paul could recall the penetrating smell of the India ink, the noise made by the steel nib on the textured paper, the smooth gliding of the brush spreading the eager to impress pigments onto the fields of carefully drawn rectangles. He has painted it after his visit to Tunisia and became smitten with the color and light his whole being absorbed there. The long walks with his friend August in “the luminous Kingdom of Light”, how he used to call it, mades color a stronger part of his new sense of perception (understanding). Color became a subtle underlining to his thoughts, a new dimension to his inner world where previously a mono-chrome vision was reigning. In contrast with the drab autumn colors in Munich, his work looked like an attempt to escape from the gray reality surrounding him, a refuge from the memories of the war years when he had to paint endlessly the monotone camouflage patterns on the Kaiser’s airplanes.

 Paul enjoyed the brief moments spent in Karen’s crammed apartment. Her nearly religious morning greeting, her thoughts of him often lingering into the time of departure for work, allowed Paul to discover surprising aspects of her personality. He could tell that on a cloudy day she would become meditative and think of her sad years back in Belgium, or that listening to Bach’s music would make her cry and crave for strawberry lintzer. However he still couldn't find out what was her line of work, what was she doing when out of that heavy squeaky door.  Strange, one would assume, but not to Paul, at least not anymore. During these frugal bits of existence he had the choice to be anywhere his mind would take him, but the comfort of Karen’s joy, when looking at the image of his painting made him stay there, content and unaware of time or purpose. His idealist metaphysics seemed to have found a fertile ground around her luminous psyche. The vivid mosaic of washes had always an uplifting effect on Karen and her first thought of the day would invariably go to Paul. It was just a poster, easy to find on E-bay for $15.99, but it did the trick – he was “in” for another brief interlude, collecting dividends .
The list  of  his "regular life-givers" was huge but there were a few  favorites like the jovial new-yorker Peter Casper the owner of a print of “Southern Gardens”, Mattia Duval from Milan who inherited “Dream City” from his uncle Giorgio together with his wit or the refined Nakao Myabi from Kyoto who had one of his early drawings. These were characters  that would stay with Paul long enough to become something like an extended family. Or little Mabel Williams from Athens, Tennessee, who was using a reproduction of his painting “Two Heads” as an orientation map for her mental journeys, while her father would lecture her about  the virtues of punctuality.  Paul often remembered when Norton bought the original and gave him one of the footholds in the universe of the rich and famous.  Now the painting, hanging in the museum he has founded, was bringing Paul a long stream of Californian “time shares”. Like most “museum time” as he chose to name it, these intervals were used for chores, for making order in his own thoughts, in developing his new persona away from the physical world. It was not what one would call “quality time”. There were just bits and pieces of an amorphous mass of thoughts, never enough to get to know someone, and used to search for a reason to exist. He could never remember much from those brief encounters – a kaleidoscope of beauty and triviality mixed together into a painful noise.

“Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses; the history of the training of this most fundamental and elusive of human powers will plunge us into deep waters.” Said Francis Yates in his “The Art of Memory”, one of Paul’s favorite readings. He was often wondering if the after-death journeys would take place within the space of one’s mind or if it would extend  through other connected minds into the outer space.

“I wonder how much she really knows about me..” was his thought while feeling the nearing void. There was always a slow down in his awareness before the imminent interruption. He could never manage to go through with the guessing game about his so called “hosts”. He had little time to look around Karen’s messy interior. His legendary pedantry made him cringe when trying to snoop into the piles of unopened mail, books, newspapers, sometimes even paper plates with leftovers from previous night’s TV dinner. For Paul, who was writing down how many times he would sharpen his pens it was a completly alien world. He couldn’t understand how she managed to live there, but it didn’t take to be a private eye to see loneliness written al over Karen’s life. He often felt overwhelmed with waves of sympathy and sorrow for her. Now, after decades of practice, he could feel an intimate kinship with those who didn’t seem to belong anywhere. Loneliness was his only constant  and paradox companion, one could say. Oh, how he missed now Lily! Before fading away, Paul recalled the words, his devoted wife, engraved on his tombstone – “I belong not only to this life. I live as well with the dead, as with those not born. Nearer to the heart of creation than others, but still too far.” Paul Klee 1879 – 1940.



Sasha Meret, Long Island, 2008



…death is a harbor with invisible piers….

The Shrine of Hronim

                                        Fragmednt of the installation "The Shrine of Hronim" by Sasha Meret

The Shrine of Hronim - The Time Particle

(an alternative history)

Welcome to The Shrine of Hronim - The Time Particle, a space for worshiping Creative Time!

The year is still 2013, but it is the Age of Hronim - The Time Particle, a place from the realm of Platonia, home of all the other possible realities.
In this time-line The Mongol Empire flourished to a total global expansion continuing Genghis Khan's unprecedentedly brutal but surprisingly progressive social policies. The split from our timeline happens in 1258 when at the siege of Baghdad  the Caliph Al-Musta'sim  accepts the terms of surrender demanded by the Great Khan Mongke.This way the great libraries of the Caliphate including the famous House of Wisdom survive the Mongol conquest and the highly sophisticated Abbasid civilisation is absorbed more or less peacefully into the Mongol global empire. Applying efficient meritocracy, forbidding any manifestation of nationalism or institutionalized religion and encouraging advanced creative thinking brings the people of the Global empire into a higher state of mind with a strong emphasis on positive pragmatism. In a few generations the Mongol rulers were assimilated and any form of individual creativity is channeled  into activities that augment the quality of life. With the elimination of the major causes of conflict the competitiveness and aggressiveness of the human nature is expressed primarily in poetry, visual arts, music and encouragement of scientific research. Based of the knowledge accumulated in the libraries of the Caliphate the research branches of genetics and theoretical physics make spectacular advances. The Philosophical studies are are primarily preoccupied with perception of reality and defining the concept of time.
 Religious thinking is free but confined to the privacy of one's home.
The dominant individual practice is The Cult of Hronim -The Time Particle, a derivative form of Buddhism  and early Gnosticism

The focus of the cult is the worship of the multiple aspects of Hronim - the Time Divinity manifested predominantly through  the relentless metamorphosis of Fashion.

Time is divided in Positive(Creative) Time and Negative Time (everything else). 

Keeping a Positive Time balance is draconically enforced. There is an IRS type of institution that audits periodically the citizens of the Global empire.  Fashion becomes the most popular creative practice for keeping  Positive Time balance sheets and wearable art is  the main form of courtship.

Hroni-Mongol early Mythology :
The Legend of Hronim (fragment)

Before anything else there was the Ocean. It was everywhere and nowhere because there where no names or anything . Then there was this feeling of something, of somthing just the same but separate.  That feeling  created the first wave - yes, Wave that is how Aquim named it, because being something it needed a name to separate it from himself. And then is when the Ocean realized that it had a name - yes, Aquim! Aquim! Where did it come from?... and why? Then the first memory just popped up - the Other! That first feeling! The Other just the same but separate. And every new thought created a new wave. And waves got bigger and more frequent and with every wave Aquim felt that it was diminishing which meant the it wasn't endless anymore . And every wave it counted was unforgettable and had a name.
...and then after the last wave, there was no more Ocean - just The Steppe and no more Aquim. But the Steppe wasn't just a name and it wasn't empty at all.  All the counted waves where still there with all their remembered names - and it was the Other Ocean all over again. And its name was Hronim.

http://www.pipoli.com/panos/sasha_meret/06/

Two Sorcerers, No Apprentice

Two Sorcerers, No Apprentice

One evening, around the Summer Solstice, 2013, at an artsy gathering in Midtown Manhattan, Ella Averbukh, a magician in her own right, approached Meret, whom she was seeing for the first time. She looked him in the eyes and said, “You are a sorcerer!”. Mirolevich was a few feet away, but she already knew him. A couple of centuries ago, a public statement like that would have gotten them in trouble. However, in twenty first-century New Babylon (or New York, as its name is disguised in Anglo-Saxon), sorcerers Meret and Mirolevich are flexing their imagination to the delight of those ready to surrender to a roller-coaster of cross-cultural references. The two grab the impossible and make it visible; then add to it the three basic ingredients of good art: mystery, surprise and fun.

The Mirolevich/Meret blend of magic is interdisciplinary (right, as if this big word could fit sorcery in any way). The younger Mirolevich is using more of the classical tools like drawing, painting, printmaking, although he’s not shying away from bold experiment.  His meta-mental constructions seem to be designed to belittle one and each to humble subatomic beginnings. Yet, this intimidating transgression is handled skillfully by Mirolevich: it makes one coming back for more!
 Meret, on the other hand, tends to get wild as he manipulates almost anything from the surroundings that can be suspected of carrying esthetic value. Anything of that sort  can be incorporated in his playful, conceptually intense sculpture/assemblages. His new series, “Témoignage from a distant Dimension,”   offers the viewer a set of ceremonial objects and artifacts from the intriguingly familiar KonSummerist culture rampant in the Lower Hudson Valley at the turn of the 21st century. If one bends his/her head in a slightly contempoparallel way, and allows just for a touch of  spelling  readjustment, it suddenly becomes crystal-clear where it all came from.

This June the Moon was eighteen % bigger than normal. Italo Calvino's recipe has it that such a time is propitious for Moon mana harvesting. Our two sorcerers they are in the middle of this ritual.
Join us at ARTHAMPTONS for some samples!

Nicolas Veh
June 2013
New York