Crossing the Line. A Painting I Will Not Show Yet

Crossing the Line

For roughly two weeks I had been carrying a certain red in my mind.

Not a flame. Not the colour of fire in its most obvious form. Rather a heavy, noble red — almost a solid mass placed close to the centre of the canvas. I knew it would be there. Everything else remained indistinct.

The beginning of the painting had its source in a story I had spoken about recently in one of my films. Someone takes from a place belonging to the gods something that human beings did not possess before. He hides it inside the stalk of a plant and carries it down to earth. From that moment on, there is no return to the world as it existed before.

That was enough.

I did not want to illustrate the myth. I was not interested in the figure of its hero or in reconstructing the story through painting. What remained was its underlying mechanism: concentration, transfer and the release of something that begins to act beyond its source.

So at first there was the red mass.

Then a form appeared that recalled the sheath of a stalk. Later, something that could be called fire began to spread across the entire field of the painting.

I was not working spontaneously in the sense of surrendering completely to chance. I worked calmly. I looked. I made decisions concerning colour, direction, matter and gesture. At the same time, I set aside some of the rules and technical habits that usually take part in constructing a painting.

This time I did not want to resolve everything at all costs.

I did not try to establish one place as more important than another. I did not search for an obligatory counterweight to the dominant form. I did not want to calm the surface simply because that might be considered the proper thing to do. Nor did I intend to act against those principles.

At a certain point, I simply stopped asking them for permission.

And then my hands completed the gesture.

When the painting was finished, I saw something I had not planned beforehand: an unusual harshness. Not an expressive scream and not a demonstration of brutality. Something far quieter, and for that reason, to me, more uncompromising.

I do not know whether that brutality was necessary.

I only know that it appeared.

The finished painting caused a kind of shock in me. Not because it depicts something frightening. What surprised me was rather the crossing of one of my own painterly boundaries — a place I had not previously allowed myself to enter.

Over the years, an artist builds more than technique. He also builds his own system of protection. He knows when a colour is too strong, when a composition begins to fall apart, when the hand should stop. Experience protects us from error.

But experience can also protect us from crossing a boundary.

This time the painting crossed it.

I do not yet know where that leads.

It measures 120 × 100 cm. It is painted in acrylic on linen canvas. At the moment I am writing these words, it is still drying.

For now, I will not show it.

I want to leave the moment of its making separate for a while — before the painting receives its title, its reproduction and its own place in the gallery.

Perhaps some of the most important moments in painting do not happen when the artist already knows how to make a painting.

They happen when the finished painting shows him that he did not yet know everything about his own painting.