- Ben Okri / In Arcadia - Intuitions before Dreaming (1)

"If music was born out of grief, painting was born out of transience within an immortal universe. Painting is the charmed presence of what will no longer be there. An enchanted absence, a visible dream, a parallel universe, defying death, underlining life’s brevity.

Painting is the meaning of humanity in a visible moment. It is the parable without text, the mystery without ritual. Painting is a hint of the intuition of the gods. It is spying on an immortal pageant. It is seeing the compressed history of humanity through the camera obscura of heaven. It is the frozen music of time’s justice and injustice. It is a vision of life from Hades enchanted. It is the secret history of light, the psychodrama of colour, the moment in a mind, the moment in a song.

Painting is what those in the Underworld remember. It is how the dead dream. It is how the enigma of time manifests itself on the cyclorama of matter. Painting is the magic riddle of mortality. It is the longing for the eternal, the happiness of the transient, the enigma of creation, the home of the heart, the fountain where loss is soothed. It is the eternal future, for painting is never in the past tense, only in the ever flowing present tense, an eternal now, a never-ending summer, a life always living, a moment never ceasing.

Painting is water, air, fire, earth, dream, but it is never death. Painting is life, life smiling at death with light as its secret.

Painting is Narcissus surprised. Painting is secret structures, harmonies, balance, chaos, force-fields, philosophy, patience, rhythm, wit, sadness, delight, tragedy. Painting is the invisible made visible, the allegory of unseen things, the resting place of a visual thought, eternal youth. Painting even when it decays is like a dream vanishing.

Painting is the Turin shroud, the manifestation of the hidden avatar on white cloth.

When paintings die, they go back to God’s mind."