CHEVALIER LAMARCK

An old drawing from a new book. He is Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck the French naturalist (I etched him for Marlena many years ago) and the book is The Art of Deception edited by Brad Honeycutt. I received it yesterday from Imagine Publishing.

THE LIBRARY

Orosz’s unassuming title “The Library” gives no hint of this print’s Escheresque themes of duality, metamorphosis, dimension, and impossible structures.  As we gaze upward at the ivy-encrusted walls surrounding the Gothic window, we think “yes, a typical old library.”  But as our gaze sweeps downwards, those outer ivy walls seamlessly metamorphose into the library’s interior, and that window, closed a moment ago, has opened into the book-filled room.  Where does “out” end, where does “in” begin?  Where does stone pillar become wooden window frame?  Gazing too long at the center of the print can produce vertigo—our brain can’t decide which way to interpret that window, and flits back and forth in its perception. The library visitor (Orosz), momentarily paused in his reading to reflect, stands on a parquet floor that rises up to become a pile of cubes. The propped sketch of a hypercube hints at this play with dimension—when does two-dimensional become three (or four)? Other impossibilities lie about—a Leonardo-like dodecahedron with impossible connections, a scrap drawing of a Penrose triangle beckoning us to discover that same triangle in the window, working its magic transformation.   And yet all of this is a library, Orosz’s own library, the spines of books inscribed with names of artists, scientists, mathematicians, musicians, philosophers, and others from whom he draws his inspiration. What will his musings produce next?

(Doris Schattschneider) 

THE WALL

A peculiar Moebius strip hovers seriously in the milk-white nothingness. The mass of robust, ancient, presumedly the Roman ruins of a gate, relatively intact Corinthian columns, parapet fragments, bare brick and stone walls, and walled-up arches winding in zigzags swims in the great whiteness, and with its artful engagement that is impossible in reality, it issues the well-known horizontal-eight form of “infinity”. Infinite in its infinity. A profoundly philosophical work. Here there is no background, no ground, origin, nature, man, animal, plant – there is no life anywhere. Perhaps we are in 3000, or 10,000 AD, by the time that this is all that remains of all of human culture in space: the remains of the wall that have absorbed these victories, defeats, sweats, blood, happiness and pain alike, capitals evoking vegetal runners...
Light and shadow, the perfect drawing here has been arranged on this sheet in the interest of a higher aim: to name the unnameable, to portray the unportrayable, to express the inexpressible, to divine the indivinable.

(György Kemény)