Undermining the Music of the Spheres
An Interview with Robert Roest

Patrick Tayler

[1] https://www.europa.nyc/roest

[2] Antonio da Correggio, Jupiter and Io, 1532—1533

[3] “Try to forget all created things that [God] ever made, and the purpose behind them, so that your thought and longing do not turn or reach out to them either in general or in particular. […] When you first begin, you find only darkness and, as it were, a cloud of unknowing. […] Do what you will, this darkness and this cloud remain between you and God, and stop you both from seeing him in the clear light of rational understanding, and from experiencing his loving sweetness in your affection. Reconcile yourself to wait in this darkness as long as is necessary, but still go on longing after him whom you love. For if you are to feel him or to see him in this life, it must always be in this cloud, in this darkness.” — Anonymous author (14th century), “The Cloud of Unknowing,” In Clifton Wolters (ed.), The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works (Penguin Books, London, 1978), 61–62.
Compare with, “Evils and their falsities are like black clouds which interpose between the sun and the eye, and take away the sunshine and the serenity of its light; although the unceasing endeavour of the sun to dissipate the opposing clouds continues, for it is operating behind them; and in the meantime, transmits something of obscure light into the eye of man by various roundabout ways.” — Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation, 2009), 458.

[4] “The Angle of a Landscape— / That every time I wake— / Between my Curtain and the Wall / Upon an ample Crack—” — stanza from 578 by Emily Dickinson

[5] According to Heinrich Krauss, clouds are part of the Heavenly Host in the Old Testament. — Heinrich Krauss, Az Angyalok. Hagyomány és értelmezés [The Angels. Tradition and Interpretation] (Budapest: Corvina, 2000), 26.

[6] Teddy Duncan Jr., “For Robert Roest, snarling dogs aren’t always angry,” Document Journal (15. 08. 2023) https://www.documentjournal.com/2023/08/robert-roest-bridddge-gallery-art-painting-i-dont-mind-if-you-forgive-me/

[7] Sam Kriss, “The internet is already over – Our God is a devourer, who makes things only for the swallowing,” Substack (18. 09. 2022) https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-already-over

A Preamble by Robert Roest:

Be aware while reading this interview that you’ll almost unavoidably experience a dissonance between what I think, what I’m attempting to convey, and what you actually read in the text. I’m trying to articulate things about ideas I play and grapple with, my thoughts and my paintings. But what I say about my paintings and what my paintings say —or say to you— don’t necessarily align! Paintings and even writings have their own voice, apart from the painter and the author. As we struggle to materialise our thoughts and mental images —of which we are more a witness than a deliberate author— there’s always some dissonance in the words, the images, the author and the reader.

In answering these questions, I try to follow a thought. I attempt to catch it like a bird of prey tries to pick out a fowl in a swarm of birds… often the prey wins. It is not seldom that I write these thoughts down and later realise the flaws and inconsistencies. I followed a thought, and by bringing it into a larger context, it fell apart or got entangled. That’s probably what you’ll see in my responses: interesting —and worthwhile— but ridden with errors and inconsistencies, which is not an issue if you accept this as a given fact.

Nothing in nature —or reality— is error-free. All processes are attempts and, thus, are erroneous. Most truths (except for the one capital “T” Truth in which all other truths are grounded) are like that: perspective, fluid, temporal and illusory. A statement is true within a certain context, but look at it more closely or within a larger whole, and it immediately falls apart.

Take a single leaf! A leaf is “true” from a certain perspective, but imagine zooming and zooming in on it… By necessity, the leaf —as you experienced it (and experience is ultimately the only undoubted given in reality) — falls apart. You’ll see atoms; if you carry on, what is it… quantum fields? Or take a single leaf, and don’t zoom in and out… but give it time. That leaf will be “true” until it disintegrates as a leaf and transforms into something else. That seems to be the nature of all truths except for that one Truth.

So, please don’t believe what I write is exactly what I think or conclusive in what (I am all about, or what) my paintings are really about! It’s a condensation of a process. What you read is similar to seeing a snapshot of a waterfall eternalised with a cheap camera compared to witnessing an actual waterfall in motion, in three-dimensional definition, while being able to move around as well. You only see a screenshot or a snapshot, but I go on and form new thoughts that put the ones you are about to read in another light. My writings, my paintings, I, and you, the interpreter; although we overlap, we also have our separate worlds.

You will probably also infuse your perspective into what you are about to read. Maybe you’ll think: what do all these metaphysical and philosophical speculations and associations have to do with his paintings? He’s just painting aggressive dogs and landscape paintings with trompe l’oeil frames around them… Well, you’re right (good point!), but I’ll tell you this; what I write, I cannot paint, and what I paint —a single rusty screw in a trompe l’oeil window frame, for example— I cannot write. How could you write a rusty screw in all its simple beauty? Could you write colour? And form? And how would you paint a stream of philosophical associations? It’s impossible!

The thoughts and ideas I play with are mud in my mind, but put on paper, they harden and dry out instantaneously into dissonant, breakable idols that diverge from what they fail to represent correctly. But you might be able to wet my hardened, dried-up mud of thoughts and mould them into your own images, statutes and idols! You might want to appreciate them, but please do not attach belief or faith to them nor identify with them.

PT: While the withered, Wyethesque window frames depicted in your series could give the viewer a pictorial prop to hold on to, something the Rückenfigur[8] might grip while being struck in awe by a manifestation of the numinous[9], I cannot shake off the feeling that I’m looking at an X-rayed, flayed and reversed ghost of painting: a see-through portal leading into the gyre of the medium. What spectres haunt your painting practice?

Robert Roest: Could it just be that I’m on good terms —and fairly at ease— with the spectral realm, the spirits? Rather than being haunted, I feel that they assist me, and, in exchange, I help them. I’m in “good spirits,” and the spirits and I usually have a great working relationship. Spectres and spirits are often understood as phantoms, deceptions or mere figments of the imagination. However, being a self-identified Schopenhauerian–Jungian idealist thinker —who welcomes the notion that reality is fundamentally mental/mind stuff— I acknowledge that these spirits have a genuine existence. Forget the image of ghouls, ghosts and spooky stuff! I’m not that superstitious; I talk about the spirit in the sense of World Spirit, as Hegel means. The one, united, overarching reality, all of reality; however, one can identify and isolate parts of this spirit into spirits.

I’ve always felt that ideas are given during art-making: a collaborative effort unfolding in dialogue with the spectral domain. You receive something, give it a physical form, and pass it on. Who is it —or what is it— that connects the dots in your mind, bringing forth an idea or the desire to paint a particular body of work? These causes or entities (are they real entities, as in self-aware beings?) are highly elusive and utterly alien. Yet, we’re all in an inseparable, natural connection with them, whether we pick up on this consciously or not.

My friend and personal influencer Schopenhauer would call it Will, which is the broadest of terms. Some thinkers, like Socrates, identified parts of that mental world as being a Daimon: an impersonal and amoral entity within, pushing you to write, paint, or follow whatever your pursuit might be. As a monist, I believe everything is ultimately interconnected and that the drive to isolate phenomena is only a matter of convenience. This specific understanding of reality aids me in cooperating with the spirits because I think of them as part of me while I’m also a part of them. We’re each other while retaining our limited perspectives, private mental boundaries, capabilities, memories and influences. As you can probably guess, I am a part/whole thinker. My apologies for carelessly mixing and mingling all these philosophical notions of different thinkers from different times into a personal synthesis. None of these philosophers would like their ideas to be amputated out of their system and used for another one. Except for Hegel, perhaps, who is a process, a dialectical thinker who acknowledges error and gives it certain credit. They’re steps of a staircase.

As for the “withered frames,” they serve at least three additional purposes besides your observations. They fulfil a practical pictorial role by eliciting a more striking illusion of depth. Skies are quite flat —the further something is, the flatter it appears— and landscapes are also quite distant. They never start right before your feet (in the pictorial world of the paintings), reaching the horizon, illusionary covering many miles… No! They start 50–100 meters from where you stand, diminishing your sense of depth.

Secondly, the frames are the size of what an actual window might be, emphasising the spectator’s point of view and transforming the paintings into (almost “real-world”) objects. (Rather than being its own —separate from our world— pictorial world.) Beyond staging a smaller-scale, self-sufficient pictorial world, the frame connects this pictorial realm with the world outside of (the) painting. It takes a step towards the “real” world (our world), integrating it by pretending that the windows are real, and not just a depiction of a window, but almost as a part of the wall of the actual building it hangs in.

Finally, somewhat complementing the romantic convention of the Rückenfigur, one can discover a traditional understanding —or view— of representational painting as opening “windows onto reality,” which plays into the title of the series as well, ...proving[10] angels are really…

PT: All this seems to echo some of the core questions concerning mimesis and pictorial autonomy elaborated as enigmatic images, for example, by René Magritte. Was his sly and poetic take on Alberti’s notion of the “painting-as-window” an influence?

RR: I used Alberti’s notion in a very literal sense. In such a wilfully naïve, literal sense, it might even seem as if I didn’t understand what he meant. I painted trompe l’oeil window frames around my paintings and seem to think that by doing so, I stand in Alberti’s tradition. But Alberti would have had big problems with my reckless use of his notion and my landscape paintings. He would be right to distance himself from me and see correctly that my paintings have nothing to do with his ideas and ideals. For him, mimicking nature was a big deal, also the naturalistic representation of perspective… order based on mathematic principles… and it was not at all necessary to literally paint a window, to literally transform painting into a window onto reality, as I seem to have been doing. His values, perspective and mimesis… are immensely distorted in my paintings. At first, it appears you are looking through a window from the inside, but the withered frames are on the outside. So, what is going on? Also, the gigantic scale of the clouds would not have found appreciation with Mr. Alberti. Some clouds in my paintings seem to reach beyond the atmosphere, which is simply impossible. It just doesn’t add up! But I don’t mind his commentary on my work; he was a terrible painter and too dogmatic for my taste.

You are the second person who mentioned Magritte. The first person initially didn’t like my paintings because Magritte had already done something like it, he thought. And better! But I don’t know. I guess what I painted is something else. Maybe entirely, or slightly, or… perhaps it is the same. But I don’t see a problem with that either… I haven’t delved much into Magritte’s ideas and concepts; I know most of his paintings as reproductions. I see he was not one of the greatest painters in the world. His painting style is quite formal, “matter of factish.” The juice seems to be in the subject matter and pictorial world. He seems to be more of a pictorial–conceptual thinker than a painter.

Because of contemporary Instagram painters’ jokes and Photoshop tricks and illusions, I most likely underestimate Magritte. I’d find him more interesting if I knew more about his work. The Internet, the memes and the visual jokes —flowing around Instagram— have destroyed my appreciation and ability to assess his work. I see how that’s unfair to an artist working far before all that digital diabolism, and you cannot judge a master based on the behaviours of his digital disciples, whom he didn’t even appoint himself. I may do myself a favour if I explore Magritte’s world more. (I have the sense that my appreciation will certainly grow.)

[11]​ “…we may refer back to the process, analysed by Klaus Krüger, by which elements aimed at the deliberate puncturing of illusion are added to paintings, a process that was popular in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Examples include painted frames or other elements through which a painting focuses attention on its own medium…” — Thijs Weststeijn, “Painting as a Mirror of Nature,” The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 304.

[12] “I have begun The Waves on the canvas. It wants three perspectives: the perspective of the sky, of the waves and of the underwater. But it shall have none. The colours by themselves must tug away like kites – like the little bits of coloured canvas they are. Yet these little bits of coloured canvas must convey all that Icarus fell through and into. What demon of purity is it that prevents me including Icarus himself in the picture? That man can now fly? That today we have a horror of the specific because our minds reach out for an ever larger and larger synthesis? Because I am suspicious of stories in paint? I suspect none of these is the answer. Rather it is that the painter has become the unseen protagonist in his own paintings.”— John Berger, A Painter of Our Time (1958). Thank you Krisztián Halega for lending me your copy in 2014!

[13] Please don’t frown too hard, but “American Color Field Painting” doesn’t include “u” in colour. So, I guess the term itself omits YOU (=U), the protagonist… (LOL)

PT: Is the “puncturing of the illusion”[11] or the act of breaking the “fourth wall”, an intriguing concept for you?

RR: It’s funny you mentioned breaking the fourth wall! I hadn’t thought about that until now. It could be that my works break the fourth wall… If they do, it’s rather subtle because my paintings have no human figures or characters. Usually, the figures do the breaking.

The spectator of my work could become —if you wish to be charitable— the Rückenfigur that looks out of a window. (Rather than seeing the Rückenfigur painted within the painting, the spectator assumes its role.) However, if we want to be exact… — and maybe we shouldn’t want anything like that… it remains to be seen and for you to judge, dear reader — it just doesn’t exactly add up because the frame is depicted from the outside, while the landscape and the sky are seen from within the building…

Outburst of “implied” interviewer: Your metafictioning is short-circuiting my imagination! So, are we looking in and out at the same time? Let me paste a quasi-metaphysical post-it note here (someone give me a medal!)! Art critic John Berger wrote a wonderful text, where the narrative’s focalizer, the “author-protagonist-conglomerate” describes an image of Icarus —a monochrome blue expanse— with no visible protagonist. Berger concludes with a sentence that seems to chime well here: “…the painter has become the unseen protagonist in his own paintings”.[12]

I know you’re not an abstract expressionist colo[13]r field specialist, but you do work with the frothy sublime æther that Rothko was sculpting floating rectangles from… (or rather, he was using the same sublime fluff archive of art-historical cloud bodies). Perhaps the fourth wall is a more indirect thing here: a game of gazes, a game of reality-breaking irrealities and irreality-shattering instances of collapse…

RR: Well, exactly! When the fourth wall is broken down, a character or person directly addresses the spectator. In painting, this might be a finger and an arrow pointing at you in Guercino’s Venus, Cupid and Mars or in Carl Bloch’s In a Roman Osteria, where three people gaze at you, seemingly annoyed by you, the spectator, looking at them… one of the more complex and subtle ones would be Velázquez’s Las Meninas, of course. It all comes down to blurring the lines between the reality of fiction and the spectators’ daily reality, the act of attempting to merge the two worlds.

But when it comes to painting, it quickly becomes a gimmick. It’s really a tall order to make it work in a non-gimmicky way! Velázquez accomplished that with Las Meninas, and then breaking the fourth wall is a brilliant feat. In many other paintings, though, it’s a bit of a joke…

It’s even harder to make it work in theatre or film. It demands coherence and consistency from the filmmaker. In the film’s reality, the narrative, the visuals, and the chain of cause and effect must add up. Even when talking about a movie in an imagined world with differently unfolding laws of nature, unearthly creatures, and made-up powers, it has to make sense within its own alternative logic system.

If a character in a film engages directly with You —the Spectator— breaking, thus, the fourth wall, You  will become a character or a bystander, a “fly on the wall”. This transformation equates your eyes with the POV of the “camera lens” in the fictional world. I would expect my new set of eyes —the camera’s lens— to accompany me throughout the film, not just occasionally. It can’t be that the POV of the omniscient eye only breaks thrice: my involvement and participation have to be consistent throughout the entire film. And that isn’t easy!

Why am I constantly engaged with what’s going on in the film(?), while I —as a film spectator— can’t vocally or physically contact the world, the characters and the scenes in the film? If you suddenly cut to an aerial shot and see the protagonist speaking to me a moment ago eye-to-eye (you might want to make this character seem small), you have to make it believable and logical. Did the “cameraman” or the “technical eye” (=me, the Spectator) walk up an invisible staircase, a mountain, or a hot air balloon and set eyes on the scene thus? Does that make sense within the narrative’s temporality and logical framework? All this complexity is why it is very difficult to incorporate the breaking of the fourth wall coherently and consistently. In painting, it is easier than in film, but it is difficult to avoid it becoming a gimmick. It’s also why films often fail to incorporate it organically.

I sometimes watch the YouTube channel Cinema Sins. A guy mercilessly points out all the flaws and inconsistencies in films. It’s amazing; please look it up! (He would probably agree with my OCD critique.) To me, it’s purifying to expose myself to ruthless criticism, especially concerning my own work. But I’m critical of my own criticism as well. (I’m also probably too harsh on poor Alberti, who did a lot to change the view on painting from mere craft to an inherent part of the arts…)

I have previously acknowledged the fluid and erroneous nature of all things, as well as my own somewhat flawed use of breaking the fourth wall. Even in Las Meninas, it’s not entirely clear what’s going on, how you, the spectator… are being addressed… or if it’s coherent — which is why it is such an intriguing painting!

Breaking the fourth wall aims to touch something within the spectator. It attempts to contact, appeal to, and find common ground for a meeting. And maybe the content of that touch is —in a few cases—of high enough value to pay the price of incoherence and inconsistency.

PT: Of course, jokes also have a similar transgressive effect. One of my favourite texts is an ancient Tumblr post[14] that seems to capture a moment where the archaic and the virtual slide into each other’s blind spots. I guess one feels really drawn today to wed the predigital and the postdigital in emblematic memes to find an appropriate exit route from… I really don’t know what.

There is, for sure (?), an archaic, cough-ridden cackle which combines neatly with the streamlined hum of my laptop… I guess pictures have become more suspicious lately! (Where is the plot twist, the joke? The unstoppable flow of images —slippery when wet!— has become one of the core clichés, but I guess it makes sense to stay alert, detecting concepto-pictorial currents and whirlpools.

Hito Steyerl — who has been researching the nature of digital imagery for a long period— envisions that “[i]n a few hundred thousand years, extraterrestrial forms of intelligence [might] incredulously sift through our wireless communications”, becoming dumbstruck by the “spam-like” plethora of imagery we emit. She also talks about cameras as “tools of disappearance”,[15] which she further highlights by her notion of the “poor image”, a term that explains how the amalgamation of low-resolution images is really “about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities”.[16] Does the post-digital transformation of pictorial paradigms interest you on a theoretical level? How do you translate the found JPEG into “oil on canvas”? Does the “richness” of oil play a role here?

RR: I am interested in digital images, artificially generated visual phenomena and machine-made images, on a very general surface level, even though I haven’t read much in-depth theoretical writing on the subject… I work extensively with (low-resolution) JPEGs and have flirted with digital imagery in my previous series. To be honest, I think I was trying to make my paintings look digital in an effort to be contemporary, fresh and a child of my time. For a while, however, paintings, especially technically well-crafted, old master paintings, have gripped me so much more than pictures generated or mediated by digital means. Like paintings that are unapologetically good, old-fashioned, well-crafted paintings! (I wouldn’t have said this in 2015 when my initial, more mature works emerged!)

Of course, certain digital images still evoke strong feelings in me, even while I scroll through Instagram —that famous meme of the melancholic cow in the surf of a sea, seemingly reflecting existence, for example…— but the issue is that it’s very difficult to turn such digital images into interesting art objects that could hang in a gallery, museum, or someone’s home! You see, I’m a very practical and pragmatic person.

Painting has been my vocation, the medium in which I am most talented. For years, I have shied away from embracing it, thinking of it as somewhat old-fashioned, with all its styles and themes already exhausted. I thought painting was only worthwhile when it proposed a next, more radical step in a progressive narrative of art. (A narrative I have come to reject as it narrows, hollows and reduces the scope of what art can do or be. It’s a terribly unimaginative and limited way of thinking about art!)

So, I sought ways to be as cool, hip and fresh as the artists who weren’t invested in painting and worked in a post-digital, post-internet fashion, creating weird material installations, sculptures or video art. Not because I loved painting or the medium so much, I actually looked a bit down on it, but because it was the medium, I had some talent and experience at it. I didn’t identify as a painter but as an artist. An ARTIST — who uses paint… (Let’s, however, try to forget that! Hush-hush!) I AM AN ARTIST!

The material in my paintings showcased absolutely no brushstrokes for an extended period and looked as digital, non-painterly and printed as I could muster. It was almost an attempt to hide that I was painting while owing a lot to the medium, not giving it credit. Trying to disguise the materiality of paint itself, pretending it’s something else. However, as I have realised, all this is very much a painterly thing, especially with representational painting or trompe l’oeils… Representational Painting is The Art of Pretending What it is Not!

Many of my efforts went into justifying painting. I wasn’t forced to engage in this kind of self-torture. However, it wasn’t without artistic merit: it let me explore interesting avenues now woven into my current practice. Also, this whole fiasco materialised in bodies of work I still appreciate.

Previously, I couldn’t help but undermine painting, question it, shoot at it, and deny it while standing every week in the studio with a palette, paint and brushes. Deep down, I wanted to paint realistic, figurative, representational paintings, but for a long time, I thought I had no reason to do so. I wished I had been born in the Dutch Golden Age to skip this parade of justifying painting and become an apprentice at Rembrandt’s atelier. But even back then, you probably had to justify your practice, I guess (?). Wrestling with your medium, questioning what and why you’re doing is —albeit uncomfortable— a good thing that ultimately pays off! It keeps you striving, makes you intentional, keeps you on your toes, constructs your vision and deepens it. The pressure put on painters to justify their medium and confront its (supposed) imminent death should be placed on the proponent of every medium — it should be the task of every artist to rescue their medium from imminent demise!

Painting—when it is well executed, which is extremely difficult—is a darn strong medium. It can appeal to emotions with much more force than digital images. My wife’s, Danielle Mckinney’s, paintings taught me that!

A few months ago, I saw a Rembrandt self-portrait at the Frick Collection, and it struck me —as if hit by lightning—it was such an intense experience. I was overwhelmed with the work’s beauty, humanity and reality. It felt like 400 years had evaporated, and I was in one space with Rembrandt for a few minutes. As someone who used to go to Musea as a robber and a thief, and not so much to be touched, I never understood why people would weep in front of a painting. But now, thank God, I know! It’s magic to me that this coloured dirt (that’s what paint is!) put on a cloth with hairy sticks can bring such a flooring experience… that a painted artefact, a representation, not the real thing (!) can do something that the real thing itself might not be able to do…

It’s especially fascinating that a certain looseness in painting is so effective. Hyper-photo-realist paintings don’t really feel like a good representation of real life, persons or objects… although they literally look more like the appearances of things… like; how come the later paintings of Rembrandt look so much more alive and human than contemporary photo-realistic painters’ work? The skin of human beings doesn’t resemble loose brushstrokes, and is much more like the photo-realistic work… and whatever is alive and vital in real life, also doesn’t look like loose brushstrokes…

It’s a mystery to me that in great paintings, we clearly can see the paint and the brushstrokes, AND we simultaneously see its transformation (while maintaining its painterly materiality) into a striking representation of something that has nothing to do with the material of paint: a dog, a landscape or a sky. For some reason, a photo-realist painting of a landscape doesn’t represent an actual landscape very well… it represents the photo of a landscape, not the landscape. Why is this so? This is the mystery of representation.

A painterly painting by John Singer Sargent, for example, resembles paint in every last square centimetre, the hair looks like paint, the skin, the different fabrics, the couch… it all looks clearly like paint, and it is paint, AND it looks, at the same time, like the material of hair, skin, lace, fur, leather, metal and wood. This is the mystery. The representation can be objectively quite different from what it represents, yet represent it in a very striking way.

 I hope —it would be such an honour for me and almost too much to hope for— that when I have left this world, people would look back at what I did and remark, “He really was a painter”.

[17] https://www.robertroest.nl/fueling-flames-dont-worship-ashes/

[18] It is interesting to note that Robert came upon this quote via the black metal band, Abigor („Time is The Sulphur in the Veins of The Saint…”, 2010).

[19] A reference to Genesis 1, before the act of creation. — RR

[20] This includes, as I understand it, all the nature beyond the senses, and who knows how vast that nature is beyond what our senses pick up on… (Maybe/perhaps reality is a better term.) — RR

[21] What do I know? I am just speculating, imagining, playing…— RR

[22] We would like to thank Roland Ferenczi (LHAS Oriental Collection) for identifying and finding the source of the quote!
Swami Vivekananda, “Inspired Talks (1895),” Inspired Talks by Swami Vivekananda (Read Books Ltd, 2013), 160.

PT: Painting is a really arcane (and radically high-tech) toolbox of thinking through “performative perception” and manipulated material. I share your admiration for Rembrandt’s stew! And this has absolutely nothing to do with aimless tradition-following or l’art pour l’art conservatism, which is the pre-canned, instant-killer critique of anybody daring to touch the subject.

One could argue that painting is not merely the “only”, slightly yawn-inspiring, “go-to” option for the shack-dwelling, dust-bunny-petting painter-troll, the isolated hermit crab whom one finds —in a state of permanent disrepair, clawing away at semi-graspable self-definitions— under the ‘umbrella term’ of shiny-new contemporary art, but something much more feral, vital and uncouth.

If you “googleartproject yourself” close enough to a Rembrandt (or visit a local museum), you suddenly start smelling his thoughts, which is absolutely weird and insane: there is nothing “cultural” about this, as it is exactly the collapse of interpersonal and intrapersonal boundaries that unfolds; resulting in the most wonderfully scruffy growls tuned to the most sophisticated of ideas, perceptions and instincts. It’s an anomaly that arranges itself into a “rich and strange” constellation for the human eye, stirring the raw materials of everyday gazing, elevated ogling and mundane watching into something that just emanates “wildanimalish” alertness. It’s a weird technology — to say the least!

Roaming through the close-ups of your current exhibition, one really senses this primal attraction to pasting the chromatic sludge of radiant oil paint, scrunching the cunningly picked tones into the depths of the woven canvas surface. I guess it is fair to say, that —imbedded in this brilliant swamp of material— one can discern an overarching conceptual narrative to your various series which, at the end of the day, all deal with the nature of perception, the constructed quality of images and our instincts connected to processing visual data. Yet, you seem to crave elements of uncalculated, eclectic chaos. Or simply said, clarity and obscurity are deeply entangled in your work. How do you push this duality when working towards an upcoming series of paintings?

RR: Yes, you see that very well! All my work revolves around these themes in some way. “Chaos”, however… regarding the series I have worked on so far, I would say I work in quite a rigid and determined way! I don’t leave much room for free, instinctive, unplanned… whatever — unless that’s what I am trying to pursue as I did, for example, in Fueling flames, don’t worship ashes![17] But within my work as a whole, I allow for an eclecticism, a plethora of styles, methods and perspectives to emerge.

It has to do with my personality: I am interested in a wide array of topics, ranging from philosophy (of mind) to physics, religious traditions, music and politics… and I go about it in a fragmented–obsessive manner.

I’ve had periods when I would spend months studying the Bible from a secular academic–scholarly perspective or delving into an obsessive study of atheism, western esotericism, and satanism, followed by months of deeply engaged and life-changing study of philosophical idealism. I’ve followed a very thorough analysis of the New Testament (NT) from the perspective of Judaism via a rabbi. Every chapter of the NT at least 45 minutes analysed; and I went through at least half of the books of the NT via this YouTube rabbi course. Lately, I’ve obsessively followed the human-manufactured horrors unfolding in Gaza, Palestine and Israel and have studied intensively its historical narratives, ideologies and geopolitics from several different perspectives. What can I say? I believe it exposes a lot about what is wrong with the world and specifically the West! Being loyal to an ally instead of international law… The rule-based order for the West seems to be generating rules that it does not abide by. It deeply troubles me. Because the arts are (or should be!) the ultimate expression of freedom and justice, which is so dear to me, I experience the suffering, captivity, ‘rightlessness’ and ‘unfreedom’ of my fellow human beings as very claustrophobic. It’s maybe not so obvious, but I think a big part of my practice has ultimately an ethical aim. In my view every philosophical, artistic, religious or scientific undertaking should have the progress of ethics and well-being as its ultimate goal.

I also have my daily dose of, and weekly engagement with, black metal, classical music and cinema! The study of science is lately a bit on a low level… (I used to follow a science podcast every week…) I am just interested in many things. I’m slightly megalomaniac and a maximalist. I am hardly an expert —or much less an authority— in these different topics but a relatively well-informed amateur. That’s perhaps the chaotic part: my rampant, boundless curiosity! And in the end, all of these inform my worldview, ideas, values, mental or spiritual life and work.

One has to select and fracture to get really good at something and work on something of value and quality. I can’t make paintings about all of my fascinations… in all the styles I like…. simultaneously… and on top of that, rather impossibility, also develop myself to a decent level at everything! Einstein has an obscure quote that appeals to me very much, “time is Satan’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”[18] To avoid everything happening at once in an all-encompassing, divine blend of dark, immaterial mud and half- or non-sensible, primal chaos over which fleeting, elusive spirits float[19], I have to fracture and light up a safety match —called lucifer in Dutch— and do one thing at a time!

I, too, believe that the most kind and gentle man, Spinoza, was right in his view that God and Nature are one. God and Nature[20] are all there is, which is everything. For the most part, God or Nature is impersonal and blind: the whole is blind, and some parts have sight.[21] But for God or Nature to get a glimpse of itself, it requires itself to be diabolical —and this is not Spinoza speaking anymore but my speculative, associative thinking— it has to throw itself apart, to rend itself asunder, to manufacture in itself the sense of multiplicity; that convenient illusion of distinct objects and subjects. I almost worship and adore this multiplicity, this separation, to seem to be (or to experience being) a private subject among other distinct subjects and objects. Unity has a soothing ring for many people. But not for me. Unity —or in religious terms Logos—, is the polar opposite of Entropy or the Diabolical. Without its opposite, Unity and Entropy are in themselves incomprehensible. Unity in itself is not good or bad. If my psyche would unite with the psyche of psychopaths, our unity wouldn’t really be a good thing. Ultimate unity would ALSO mean being united with the vilest and most evil, uncaring, blind, relentless parts of reality: merging into a monolithic-static-unaware-blind-divine-integrated oneness. I guess I have quite a pessimistic, ruthless view of God/Nature/Reality. I think it is clearly (as a whole) amoral, uncaring and blind. What we would call good or just, doesn’t happen naturally in reality. If it happens, it seems to be random, unintended, or deliberately manufactured by caring, conscious human beings. It is because of my pessimistic view of reality —when it comes to ethics, goodness and justice— that I am happy not experiencing being fully united with it. If I didn’t experience psychic and/or physical boundaries, I would experience all the suffering of reality and inflict it. That’s why I’m glad to be (or rather experience myself to be) a distinct, private subject among subjects. (Only with my reason I believe this separation, which I am very thankful for, is a matter of convenience on some surface level.) To quote a Hindu thinker, Swami Vivekananda, “I do not want to be sugar; I want to taste sugar.”[22] I want to be separate from it so I can taste and enjoy it!

Ooh! How much I appreciate experiencing God or Nature or Reality as seemingly being cut off, spitted out, fallen, thrown into it, seemingly from the outside (which is an utter illusion: there is no outside of God/Nature/Reality!) and lighting up lucifers (=safety matches) and finding my way back without (perhaps hopefully) ever getting there! Logos —that blessed call to unity— and the Diabolical, that blessed destroyer, in an eternal dance. Blessed curse! Logos, to prevent ultimate isolation, and the Diabolical, to prevent ultimate oneness. Maybe that is what reality is, God diabolically and “Logosly” deceiving itself. We, humans, are often so naïve and unaware in thinking in terms of good and evil and strongly projecting (and associating) these with black/white, darkness/light, unity/entropy, and Logos/the Diabolical. Black, darkness, entropy and the diabolical = bad. White, light, unity and Logos = good. But that’s utter nonsense! Light without darkness is as blinding as darkness without light. Unity without entropy is as isolated and solipsistic as entropy without unity. Light is beautiful, but let’s not forget that the sun, in terms of scale —not detail— obscures more than it illuminates. The sun’s light obscures billions of stars and galaxies. One needs a lot of darkness to pick up on them.

PT: I would have to rewind a few times to extract all your points… but in the meantime, how do you structure your thought process / artistic process on, like, a more nitty-gritty, pragmatic level?

RR: In practice, I approach this by loosely imagining a regular exhibition space (as a starting point) that has to be filled with work: this could be five of fifteen works, small or large or both. But it must be filled with a coherent, consistent body of work! In the past, I had also used the example of the filmmaker’s oeuvre as an analogy. Filmmakers make several films with various narratives, characters, and sometimes even styles, and certain filmmakers have a very eclectic body of work, like Stanley Kubrick, for example… but it’s always one film (with one style and concept) at a time! Or you could look at bands or composers… some have many ideas, compositions and songs, but it’s organised as —or coherent within— an album, a mass, a symphony, a piano concerto, or what have you… As an artist —or may I call myself already a painter?— I want to allow within my practice a sense of freedom and eclecticism, but for the sake of grounding, quality, consistency and coherence, I work on a project basis. I like to think of my work as an ecosystem of sorts, maybe a microcosm, but that might sound way too grandiose. However, my work can appear in a variety of styles and themes — some get along well, and others find themselves in a dissonant relationship with one another — they are thoroughly bound together in one ecosystem.

I think from the perspective of a dying artist looking back. In this retrospection, I want to see very serious work. I want to see outrageously silly, funny and ridiculous work, abstract and classical work… and rude, dark, refined, sombre, happy, aggressive and tranquil works. Simple, straightforward work and self-reflective meta work. But each in its own ordered place! I don’t know if I can ever live up to this ideal… however, I can’t help but have this vision and give it my best shot while accepting my obvious limitations and trying to be a hardworking servant of this ideal.

As for how I work towards a new series of paintings, I have a quite laid-back approach. You see, it’s mostly up to the spirits and what ideas they’ll pass on. (I think all possible ideas possibly pass by; the spirits are non-judgemental and have themselves no idea… they have no idea that they are ideas themselves, carrying ideas — if you understand what I mean!) One can only hope to be receptive and pick up on the ones that really have a chance to stick to the glue of my personal insights, predispositions and capabilities. For me, it is a highly organic, chaotic, intuitive, yet passive process in which I am, initially, passively susceptible, have my senses open and my antennae “on green.” Still, I don’t write things down to remember. If an idea is worthwhile enough to pursue, (if it wills so that I have to do the materialising and not someone else) it will come back again and again until I’ve grasped it!

 Once a body of work is finished and I have to choose what I’m gonna start working on next, now, that is a stressful period in which I often feel insecure! Having, getting, and receiving worthwhile ideas is easy; the spirits are full of great (also terrible though… because they don’t judge, they don’t make assessments) ideas, but materialising, mediating and transforming them… is pretty difficult. I have to be quite pragmatic at this stage. So, I try to choose what I feel technically most prepared for. Besides fulfilling many further functions, certain series of mine also serve as a stepping stone to enable me to get to a technically more challenging task[23] that the spirits initially had in mind for me.

The overarching theme concerning the nature[24] of perception, the constructed quality of images, the anatomy of representation and our instincts connected to processing visual data is a coherent yet very wide theme. With a bit of arguing and creative thinking, every idea that comes to me can find a room in this house of ideas under that protective roof of coherence.  Maybe there are some odd plants and objects in this house, making it hopefully more interesting and worthwhile to explore.

[25] Black metal often has satanic lyrics. Sometimes just for shock value or mockery, but sometimes also seriously and genuinely explored or held as a metaphysical worldview. — RR

PT: Contemporary art seems to have an obsession with subverting, virtualising and staging demonology, curses, superstitions and black magic, which seeps into the iconographic choices and installation strategies of several artists. Was this something that played into your angelological mission? Do you think about your isolated, cloud-framed, blood-drenched zombies as antagonists to these fair beings?

RR: On the level of appearance, yes, they are antagonists. Because behind the veil of appearance —and that’s the only thing that can be painted: appearances— they have a lot in common. Namely, both angels and zombies are empty. The angels I paint are not angels but cloud formations, sky-born water in a gaseous state. Wait a few seconds, and the wind changes the appearance of the minuscule water droplets from angel to pig. And from pig to a non-presentational form, and from that to thick raindrops that fall on you on your way home, and, oh man, don’t you just hate getting wet of what you not long ago associated with an angel?

And what are angels really? Does anyone who genuinely believes in the existence of angels really picture them as human-like beings with wings? Aren’t they supposed to be immaterial? Maybe there is a reality behind the image of an angel. However, the image and ideas around it are formed according to our likeness. And does it matter that they’re in the sky? Aren’t clouds and angels as different as a fairy from a rock? What have earthly skies, with their fleeting clouds, to do with heaven?

No one really believes anymore that heaven is somewhere where the clouds are, as they used to believe in the past. If you fly in a plane, you will see how close the clouds are, and you will notice that you aren’t flying in heaven really, nor do you see your deceased loved ones walking in the clouds with the saints and gods. The fact that we often associate heaven with skies and clouds comes from the ancients who believed the gods were just out of sight, just a little bit beyond or between the clouds, or on high mountaintops just out of reach for mankind. Also, Yahweh is referred to as “the rider on the clouds”. But we have known for a while now that heaven (if it’s somewhere) is clearly not between or just beyond the clouds. Yet, in our collective imagination and correlations, connecting and mingling these things together makes perfect sense. Ascension stories from different religions, Elijah’s, Jesus’s, and Mohammed’s upward-bound journeys suggest God and heaven beyond the clouds.

If you yell, they can hear you!

I know many believers who have no problem literally believing in these ascensions.

But how do you picture it?

The saint rises up one meter, two metres, ten, one-hundred, one-thousand… but when does the saint arrive in heaven?

Just beyond the clouds seems to be at least light years of inhospitable, radioactive, ultraviolet, potentially boundless space.

I don’t think the material universe is all there is. I think, like Schopenhauer, it is a representation of Will. I don’t know how vast and varied the representations can be. As an individual, I know at least one, mine, and assume there are others, like the representation animals have. But the representations for all I know may be boundless! As an individual of Homo sapiens, I am limited to experiencing this single human representation. However, I also think there’s no real connection between heaven and sky, angels and clouds. The deceiving, angel-mimicking clouds, or to be precise, our imagination of an angel —as an idea and image— projected onto clouds, have a positive, sometimes even soothing effect on people who accept the leap of faith, who accept the realm of appearances, and are not keen on the destruction of appearances. Obviously, zombies evoke a more negative feeling in people. However, the zombie is nothing but appearance! If I am correct, the zombie is one of the emptiest mythical beings we’ve imagined and invented — also one of the latest ones. It has no content, no character, no inner life, no identity.

There seems to be a niche in the art world exploring this aesthetic you mentioned. I’m unsure where it comes from or what it tries to communicate, but I am attracted to it. Maybe for the same reason, I’m drawn to black metal.[25] I grew up in a conservative Christian family, and there was big-time anxiety around anything related to magic or the devil. I recall Christian magazines, pastors and authority figures warning us about devilry and magic. Or at school, warning lectures about pop and rock music and how the devil is being played with and not taken seriously, and how this music has real satanic power over people. Even playing cards was considered “playing with fire” because the Joker was associated with the devil. Something like yoga was not seen as innocent gymnastics but as the devil’s playground. The devil could lurk everywhere and at any time. The point was to be aware of it, take it very seriously, avoid it, and not be curious. Just a religious curiosity about what your supposed spiritual enemy is all about was already considered dangerous. The idea was that the devil tied in with our godless desires. Our human nature was much more grafted on the devil’s nature, by default, by birth even, than it was on God. It was a somewhat paradoxical challenge to be awake and aware that the devil is everywhere yet also to be a bit oblivious to it and pay it no attention. In short, giving it curious attention can give it power over you. However, giving it no attention means it has free access to influence you without you even noticing.

My curiosity ultimately won, and since then, I have been quite a bit satanised, sanitised, and a playing ground for devils! But I must say, they are very respective of my sovereignty and dignity and don’t mind me trying to live ethically! They can be mind-opening, asking brutally–mockingly honest questions. They seduce you to explore who you are —or want to become!—, and what other objects and subjects may be, or become and challenge all authorities because they can’t stand hierarchies and domination. They seduce you to light up some dark segment of reality, to light up a match in the big, dark, instinctive mind of God. Then we shock and shiver about what appears in that light and blame the devils. But they’re the mirrors in which we can catch a glimpse of ourselves and Nature/God/Reality. Some readers may think I worship devils, but you have to keep in mind only gods want to be worshipped. Not the devils, they don’t see the point of worshipping or being worshipped, and I don’t either.

Images are important; they have power if we give it to them. And we give it to them all the time, often without being aware of it. Images —understand this in the widest sense: ideas and theories are also images!— seem to be all we can access.

Turning images upside down, collaging or merging them can be useful for developing insights. I tend to do it a lot. Especially with the elements, language and narratives of religion, physics and philosophy, it can be interesting to subvert, collage, and cut and paste — because it is easy to conflate the images with what they represent.[26] So much so that what was represented is often forgotten…

To fool and play around, mixing images taken from religion, science and philosophy, as you have read, is a highly erroneous business. Things could go wrong. In my mind, I don’t play with these ideas, thinking that I can construct a theory that represents reality correctly and that you or I should believe in whatever I construct…

But to tilt the soil of our minds, and throw in some seeds and see what sprouts out… Who knows? It might bear some tasty fruits! Maybe even forbidden ones! I appreciate the art of introspection (religion), the experimentation that delves into the natural world (science) and the art of reason (philosophy), but philosophers and religionists are especially prone to falling into the trap of believing themselves too much. The writers of the Daoist texts are a great exception to this habit of philosophers, religionists and scientists.

Is it not so that art was magical in our early human history? Or used for magic purposes, rituals and spells, exorcisms, invocations and incantations? I really love that! Art objects used to be an integral part of social and spiritual life. Like some kind of “kitchenware” for human mental and spiritual life. Artistic objects as “mental kitchenware” to spoon us substantial —substantial in the Spinozian sense— and metaphysical nourishments or something…

Its counter-reaction is also interesting to me: the anxiety many monotheïst traditions have for images and the prohibition of making images (and worshipping them). I love that, too! I feel a kinship with the anxious monotheïst in the scepticism concerning images. Both opposites showcase a deep belief in the magic of images. If you have to forbid the construction of graven images, you believe in their magical power! The image worshipper, the idolatrous, believes too much in the image. In contrast, the iconoclastic, image-anxious monotheïst forgets he also inescapably engages in images, constructing them and in forgetting he does, he deceives himself. He’s the exception. He thinks he is on a path beyond images. He deceives himself that there could be an image-free engagement with reality. The image-anxious monotheist fails to finish his job of destroying images. He fails to destroy its own images. I am not sure if you can merge the two invaluable values of both approaches or if they mutually exclude each other. The first perhaps recognises that we can’t live without images; it’s all we have access to, and the second acknowledges that images can never grasp the true nature of things. Without seeing the entirety of things, we cannot grasp the parts; without seeing all the parts, we cannot see the whole, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal. I find myself somewhere in the middle. I try to take images seriously but not literally.[27] My attempts to undermine my beliefs and images, which always entail the revelation/construction of new ones, showcase my religious demeanour and devotion to reality beyond images. Which is kind of a practical ethos, a suspension of judgement, which is almost unavoidable if you have a process view of reality like I do, because I don’t think it’s possible to hold an image-free engagement with reality. Dreamless sleep maybe, but there’s not much engaging with reality there…

Take my images, paintings and texts, dead serious AND with truckloads of salt! Deal with images as you do with food: consume it, fill your belly with it, until you are full of it but then shit it out, clean up, and flush the bullshit to profane, deep, fertile places!

[29] 
It’s the way it is all bound together! “»The nail in the plank is stationary while the position of the hammer is variable …« he meditated, looking up to heaven, and this meditation appeared to suggest that he should concentrate upon the latter, but on considering the question further with a clearer head, having observed the angle of the hammer as he tried to bring it down again, he was forced sourly to acknowledge that even should the hammer feel more secure in his grip his chances of hitting the nail on the head were no better than one in ten at best. »What matters,« he corrected himself, »is where I want the contact to take place … Is … what it is I want to hammer in.«„ [László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (New York City: W W Norton & Co, 2002)]. — PT

PT: If we shyly lower our gaze into the lowlands of your paintings, the viewer might be reminded of the tradition of golden-age Dutch painting or the skyscapes of Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857) with their faint hints and allusions to a more profane ground level. In this “unfenced predella,” you seem to be testing the haptic, tactile and mimetic limits of painting[28], creating microcosms where the emphasis is on “good-old” depiction, in contrast to the ideas of deception, belief and doubt that power the dynamic charge of the “main” segment above. Is there a painterly side quest to these panoramas?

RR: It is interesting that you distinguish between the painted ground as a “good-old depiction” and the skies! May I slightly change what you said and turn it into “good-old deception”? The ground is “good-old, profane depiction”. The sky is “good-old sacred deception”. I don’t know where it would metaphorically lead if we would take this “profane vs sacred” and “depiction vs deception” perspective, but let’s see!

The paintings started out without much —or any— landscape elements. My painterly reason for adding well-crafted, profane landscapes to the skies of sacred deceptions was simply to blow up the skies. To give it context. The clouds in the paintings, only the vertical ones, have the form and size of a full human body, from top to toe. They are essentially portraits. That is a very manipulative move. The clouds are based on real ones, and I was quite true to the witnessed particular clouds. But in your field of vision, they would make up only a tiny fragment of the grand sky with its host of clouds, often much larger than the ‘angelic’ fragment I isolated, lifted out, or, you could say, portrayed. The landscapes I painted make the scale of the clouds palpable and make them dominate the entire panorama. 

It could be —and this is just a logical follow-up of the profane ground vs sacred skies perspective— that we choose to follow the pictorial paradigm that a sacred deception only works if founded on profane depiction. The sky is, in reality, not based on the ground; it doesn’t lean on the ground, and the ground doesn’t support the sky… and now I think about it in terms of physics, it may be the other way around. The ground is founded on and supported by the sky; the ground leans in on the sky. The skies keep the earth in place, not the other way around. We think that something that gives support must be like the ground: firm, stable and hard, but it’s the other way around. That flimsy, fleeting, airy, fluid and elusive sky, that “good-old sacred deception,” supports “good-old profane depiction”. So, the logical conclusion in this thought experiment would be that we come to profane depictions because of sacred deceptions. And, albeit true, you can only fall through the sky, not through the ground; only the ground can make your fall hurt or fatal. If there were no ground, you would collapse, but not fall apart; you’d stay intact.[29] That’s the nature of being becoming, eternally falling, yet not falling apart.

[30] “It’s a hazy white day, and the highway lifts to a drained sky. There are four northbound lanes and you are driving in the third lane and there are cars ahead and behind and to both sides, although not too many and not too close. When you reach the top of the incline, something happens and the cars begin to move unhurriedly now, seemingly self-propelled, coasting smoothly on the level surface. Everything is slow and hazy and drained and it all happens around the word seem. All the cars including yours seem to flow in dissociated motion, giving the impression of or presenting the appearance of, and the highway runs in a white hum. Then the mood passes. The noise and rush and blur are back and you slide into your life again, feeling the painful weight in your chest.” — Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York City: Scribner, 2001).

[31] To get back to where we started, you might want to choose to read this passage by Wolfram von Eschenbach on the impossibility of prying open the magical box of metaphor: “This flying metaphor will be much too swift for dullards. They will not be able to think it through because it will run from them like a startled rabbit. Mirrors coated on the back with tin, and blind men’s dreams, these catch only the surface of the face, and that dim light cannot steadfastly endure even though it may make fleeting joy real. Anyone who grabs the hair in the palm of my hand, where there isn’t any, has indeed learned how to grab close. And if I cry, Ouch!, it will only show what kind of a mind I have. Shall I look for loyalty precisely where it vanishes, as fire in running water, dew in the sun?” — Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 13th century

PT: There is an atmospheric passage[30] in Don DeLillo’s novel The Body Artist that I am reminded of while looking at your paintings. You could describe it as a moment of dislocation, where something seemingly transcendental seeps through the mundane props of reality. Is it possible to look at these angels as projections, visual cues that embody moments of personal transformation, or is this impossibly naïve for your taste?

RR: No, it doesn’t sound naïve to me, and yes, I’ve noticed that it is possible because I sometimes hear what people think of my paintings. For me, personally, however, it is not possible and an overstretch. But not for everybody. Some people can stretch out far and reach what is unreachable for me. That’s because I have no belief and faith in the sense of these words. But please don’t pity me for lacking these fine qualities! I’m alright! Belief and religion seem to me as much a quality as a trap. And whether we believe and have faith — or not — is not up to us. We are gifted and/or burdened by it — or not. We only notice if we have or lack such qualities. But I’m not the measure of things. I am but a perspective. I do have an interest in and care for other people, though. I have some empathy, and I want to be of service. I am not the only spectator or interpreter of my work.

What other people say to me they taste in my work, I take that really seriously, even if I don’t recognise that taste. I’ve heard that the cloud paintings bring some people to their passed-away loved ones. I’ve been told that more than twice. A painted cloud transports them to their loved ones, defying space and time. That’s not so much because my paintings are so good or magical or special or because of my intentions… not at all. I think it is because the forms in the cloud paintings resemble catholic saintly-looking, old tombstones.

Lately, I was at a beautiful graveyard, with all these angelic sculptures and Jesuses and saints on their tall pedestals, standing tall before their expansive skies. Blessing quietly all around, mourning, and being empathetic with us. The similarities were obvious. There, I realised what transported some to their deceased loved ones seeing my paintings. It confirmed my view on the mediumship of art. You pass something along, something you can only partially understand, but it finds its way, irrespective of the medium, to where it wants to go or be received. What you mediate doesn’t necessarily have to be beautiful, true or good, though. The spirits giving these ideas are amoral and impersonal, so we(!) must assess what is mediated through pictures.

Transcendence is not in the things themselves. It is not in the material objects or in spiritual objects. Transcendence is a type of experience one can have. In my understanding, it is not something outside of us that can come to us or something we can come to. No, material or spiritual things objects cannot be transcendent; our experience could potentially be transcendent, meaning rising above the ordinary. As I understand it, transcendence is a very high or intense quality of experience. Most of the time, our experiences are ordinary, not because the things we experience are ordinary, dull or uninteresting… they are what they are.

You can look at a tree and find its colour, texture, height, form and smell… but you won’t discover ‘interesting’ in a tree. Or ‘beautiful’. That ‘beauty’ and ‘interesting’ is a quality in you. ‘Beautiful’ or ‘interesting’ doesn’t say anything meaningful or true about that tree but about your experience of it. Maybe transcendent qualities of experience are quite rare because they’re so intense. Having a softened, somewhat numbed, ordinary, run-of-the-mill-quality experience is probably more useful and functional. Or maybe we don’t usually have daily transcendent experiences because we are such an integral part of reality that we take it for granted. But if you start reflecting, trying to understand anything, and go deeper and further… reflect with attention on any material object in the world or any mental object in us, that reflecting will rise to a quality of transcendence. A single blade of grass, a pebble on the road, a screw in a window… ponder its origin, how it came to where it is, how it got its form, colour or density, and where it is when it goes! You will experience transcendence and marvel at the profound mystery of all things. If that already is so mysterious and profound, how much more the curious eyes of a kid playing in the sand, or smiling women, or a melancholic man?!

Study matter, yet, but what is matter, really? We actually don’t know, really! We zoom in and in, and at some point, we come to something we call quantum fields that get „excited,” furthermore, it has something called „spooky action” at a distance, which, for now, we think is an underlying reality of the material world… (this theory is the most well-tested theory in the history of scientific theories!) It is extremely wonderful and mysterious and complex and strange… but is but one fragile, strong leaf —that bursts out of a rigid hard branch in spring— less extremely wonderful and mysterious and complex and strange? (Or let’s compare the ‘trueness’ of quantum fields and leaves… Are quantum fields truer than leaves because they seem to be more foundational? And is something more or less true based on how temporal they are? Is a leaf less true because it lasts only one season?

Or, with mental objects, ponder feelings, the nature of thoughts, and the nature of visual or audible memory… in my mind, I can picture my mother’s face or a mountain I once climbed; I can picture countless existing and non-existing things and her voice, but where are these images really located? You can analyse and dissect my brain organ, but you won’t see what I see. You won’t hear that voice of my mother in my mind (as I hear and experience it). And with which eyes do I see that image in my mind? And with which ears do I hear that memorised voice? Not with my physical eyes. They’re gazing at my screen at this text I’m writing. Not with my physical ears; they’re hearing virtually nothing at the moment. (There is the buzz of an air purifier or whatever that sound is…)

Transcendence is not in my paintings; it doesn’t seep in, but it can be the quality of your experience. For me, it is probably something like this: of all the things that one can do, and in the midst of all that goes on in the world, in the universe, in Reality, (in God, in Nature) in living beings, in humans, in me…. I am spending all the time I need to paint a single screw in the frame of my paintings, and for a few minutes, the whole universe, all of reality seems to hang together on this screw and seems —seen from my private little perspective— to almost turn around this represented and artificial, painted little screw.[31]