reflections on artwork

Come per acqua cupa cosa grave...
Like some heavy thing in dark water...
Dante Alighieri; La Divina Commedia. Purgatorio III, 123

Sometimes lints flicker across the retina, fragments of the vitreous body, tenaciously drifting off, as soon as one tries to focus. There is a shape, a texture, a depth even, that remains beyond reach. Like the surface of a stone, descending into black waters, withdrawing slowly,  from the eye of the observer.
If your glance could break through the mirrors of the tear film, grasping what vigorously wriggles out of your sight. Penetrate the fibres and enter the realm of the objects that appear as world, as self, as image.
Dream Work. I see the mounds and skeins of paint that grow out of a swamp of an umber surface. Currents of pigment that gush forth towards a gravitational point, building up to a suction into the void of the canvas.
Buds of acrylic drip from dusky fields of color.  Beneath the carved, the poured and flicked landscapes, in the vastness of the interstices, there lies a serenity.
It seems to reach out from the canvas, replenishing the ravines of physical space.
The outlines of a face have been drawn into the ashes, creating moles of dust in their path. The face appears erratic, quiescent, like an X-Ray image. It emerges as a memory, that cloaks my mind  like a veil of minuscule particles of sensations and humors, a dusting of atoms.  
Time lapses. The split second in which you see the fragments of imagery, space becomes ossified. Thrown back in a sudden repulsion, you catch stable ground, stumbling to regain your balance, gathering your disparate parts. A reminiscence remains, a subliminal taste.

It leaves an almost corporeal mark.
Text by Anna Gien