Painted Bareness

Sometimes you can see more in the dark.
Or things in addition.
At least more slowly.
This happened long ago.
And once.

I arrived late, later than the clock showed.
My map was so new and beautiful that it had nothing to say to my mind.
Carefully folded rustling patterns.
Like travelling in the company of a skirt hem.

I spent the night in a house with three times the number of storeys, corridors, staircases and rooms than you would have thought in the beam of the car’s headlights.

-Welcome. No problem. It’s been a long time… Here’s your room. Good. Night. See you in the morning.

I woke in the early hours. Thirsty. I went to look for a tap. Or a toilet. The moon was full, wedging its light into the rooms. Moonlight looking like paper on the floors. I tried not to step on the sheets.

Breathing behind closed doors. Refrigerator humming somewhere. The snap of parquetry.

I had come to the door of a living-room that filled the whole floor. So close to the edge of the house that I felt dizzy. Or was it just a corridor enclosing the house like an angular ring, an orbit for the sleepless and lost?

It happened there and then.
From which these words come.

Next to me I saw a surface woven of cobwebs or silk. (Or was that part of the wall frozen?) Dimly shining figures. Thousands of fibrous marks, mycelia… flickering and throbbing.

Grey in black, darkness in shade, layered and overlapping. Latent image with heartbeat. Continuum bound to time and place. Not a sight but a feeling. The feeling of being.

It was all different in the morning.
It was just a painting by Marika Makelä on the wall.
All that the darkness had left behind.
Or its spoor.
Painted bareness.
Being. Matter.
Particles of pigment in espresso vapour.

Twelve steps before Marika (N.B. This is taking place now, just a moment ago), I see through the window of the staircase a hammock made of blue rope on a snow-padded balcony. And diagonally upwards, high up on the left, an observatory built on the roof. Would I even have noticed them if I hadn’t been so close to Marika (I can already smell the cigarette smoke)? If I hadn’t been on my way to see.

Twenty-five paintings, of course I first thought there were thirty, dignified, in the same space, on all the walls, with no beginning or end.

And then it all comes immediately to mind, tightening my forehead and temples and drying my mouth, and the conversation with Marika doesn’t really lead anywhere.

It’s doesn’t matter. It’s really better like this,

(There they are leaning against the walls. Or falling onto each other on the floor. And smelling good. Everything is good. Everything has arrived.)

- No self-portraits, just pictures of the self freed from portrayal.
- No self, just its depths.
- Conversions into paintings while painted.
- Transition there, not back.
- Finite standstills.
- Layered excavation marked slowly and carefully.
- Noting something.
- Floor plans from the deep.
- Liberation from the illusion of explanation or owning.
- Leaving things as such and as they are.
- Pure existence on its own.
- Signings.

And again I would like to take Marika’s paintings/panels of material and pile upside down on the floors. Or hang them reversed on the walls. I’ve always had the gut feeling that her works are related to fortune-telling cards – laid in "tables" and fields through set formulas and rituals.

These are close views of interiors. Be the subject anything at all, material or immaterial. Bacterium or cell, flesh or mineral alike: a seeking and exploring mind will perceive and pass on its discoveries in the guise of formulas looking like designs.

It is about specification. What the thought has in mind. This is the sensual pleasure of demonstrating that which is experienced. The logic of womb or seed.

Lovers, wet, hot and slick, panting into one another’s ears: QED! QED! QED! (Quod erat demonstrandum! Which was to be demonstrated!)