Eros and Thanatos

Erupting volcano, syrupy landscape, these images are clichés of love. Seventh heaven or burning passion, the commonplace pervades genuine experience. Is authenticity possible at all? I do not decide it.

The inscription, “EROS SORE,” breaks the continuity of the representation although it is itself full of representation: in each painting, the letters repeat “across” colours and forms of the other. The symmetry is nearly perfect. Pun lovers will recognise the palindrome.

The diptych “Thanatos” suggests death and hatred, the shadowy side of life, in a word, the unrepresentable. Μíμησις meets its limits here. That is why I have just written the word “hate” in different languages with black glossy letters on a black matte background. The confusion of languages refers to the Babelian lethal megalomania of some human projects; it also refers, if I dare say, to the universal success of hate.

The other panel of the diptych is simply a coarsely plastered, square piece of wood. There is no image. Plaster strips are normally used for broken limbs; the matte white could be the colour of a poor shroud.

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