No Porpoise

1995-2000

mixed technique 80x160x5 cm (LED internally lit)

Dedicated to Charles Darwin’s “H.M.S. Beagle”

‘No good fish goes anywhere without a porpoise.’ Lewis Carroll

One realizes an idea as a retracing of an image and an association of thoughts.

The titles of the works are not explanations, and works are not illustrations of the titles. ‘No Porpoise’ makes the statement that the image is not the subject, as in Magritte’s ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’. When Magritte wrote on his painting: ‘This is not a pipe’ he was drawing attention to the fact that you cannot smoke the image.

Instead, in this aesthetically pleasing picture, the subject of the painting is simply not there - you cannot even have an indirect experience of the porpoise since it is totally absent and even if it were there it would not be a porpoise but a dolphin! The mind reels ! A double backwards somersault off a trapeze, without a safety net !

Images are illusions, contradictions in terms.

Furthermore, it would take an act of magic to transform a porpoise into a seascape (inclusive of a graphic representation Darwin’s ‘HMS Beagle’), just as Magritte used an act of magic to transform a woman’s flesh into a sky in ‘La Magie Noire’.

‘The relationship between the title and the picture is poetic, that is to say that this report maintains only the object’s features normally ignored by conscience, but sometimes foreboded during extraordinary events that reason has not yet been able to clarify’.
                                                                    Renè Magritte 1946

If you are not satisfied with the above ‘explanations’, try instead to work out the purpose (if any) of a porpoise’s (or is it a dolphin?) evolution! Why is the cetacean in the picture (or not in the picture) the shape it is?