Oso Para Vos

«Grotesque / Falling down the Rabbit Hole», oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm., 2021.

“Grotesque” is an architectural painting, depicting an abandoned villa in ruins. The painting derives its title from the terracotta grotesque on the facade of the building, which is a miniature self-portrait of The Dreamer. Underneath the grotesque of the sleeping dreamer is the inscription «Domus Somnia». This painting is about a nocturnal journey where the dreamer, who has been out walking about, suddenly comes upon an inviting and dilapidated villa — empty and door-less. As in many dreams, the structure is both familiar and not to the dreamer. Here, there is a head-on frontal perspective which is at once both two and three dimensional, and almost cardboard-like, thus accentuating the fragility of this mental architectural construction — which can change or disappear in a fleeting second. Even though the columns and steps at the entrance show signs of a dizzying slight sway forewarning collapse, the Dreamer cannot resist entering through the dark portal — unwitting that he is soon to fall into a bottomless void of Darkness. Should the dreamer allow the building to collapse before entering and rather move on to another dream sequence in this nocturnal journey, or should he play out his role as The Fool and hope that he can wake himself up when necessary?

Nocturnal Journey.

In the twenty-fifth hour,
as sleeplessness concedes
to Jungian twilight,
the inviolate ticking
of the bedside clock
betrays consciousness
with sinister rhythm.

It is a requiem of
abandonment, whereby
unprotected souls are
magically ushered to
the threshold of time’s end.

Clock hands melt into
surreal images of groping,
disembodied appendages which
pull me down into the
infernal swirling oblivion.

I seem to fall forever;
plummeting past floating
sandstone ruins, through
prehistoric jungles and
at last into a vast galaxy
of translucent emerald shards.

The heartbeats of innumerable
still-terrified predecessors
urge me to scream before
striking bottom, and I
awaken in a panic: grasping
for the luminous dial
of my unwitting timepiece.

— Adam Donaldson Powell, “Collected poems and stories”, Cyberwit, 2005.