Streetlights
Metaphors bearing allegories of light and vision are as ubiquitous as the countless lamposts that line our city streets.
The substance of light and the faculty of vision are cloaked in a timeworn patina of semantic investments and yet they pervade language with such transparency that not unlike the ordinary streetlight, they manage to blend into the familiar haze of the commonplace.
When not synonymous to knowledge itself, the lofty metaphors of light inform such universal ideals as spiritual emancipation and the triumph of reason. They generally ensure and entrench the legacy of a metaphysics of presence.
But on the other side of its half-life of service, the streetlight stands forlorn in broad daylight, a vacant signifier with a faltering murmur, a presence that lapses in destitution and loss.
In functional recess and more necessitous of the substance it is built to dispense, it points at the horizon of the intelligible as it recounts the ninety-nine flavors of absence.
Selected Paintings on canvas
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Oil and other media on canvas, from left to right:
Turn-off; Light Ahead; To shade a light; Eunuch; Same Root; Civil War Rationale; Parallax Error; Fiat Lux.
Details from Signals and Tracks, Mixed mediums on Canvas.
Razor Fence Park Oil and Acrylic on Canvas.
Lumigens
Cycle of graphite and ink drawings
This page is dedicated to sedentary wanderers and urban drifters, to those who in stillness, span multifarious orbs and run the speed of light in the blink of an eye.
For metropolitan nomads weaving a web of signals and tracks, for poets of the road mapping territories with provisional trails, the street is the pregnant skin of the world, the conductive plane where sooner or later, all interior spaces come to surface.
Out on the open circuits of the city is the ubiquitous streetlight, an easily overlooked unit of the urban landscape, an endlessly multiplied object that punctuates every avenue, boulevard and crossroad.
Self-effacing sentinel, one among so many and yet strikingly singular, monumental and yet diffuse, a note in an unfurling fugue, a metronome whose only constant is change and variation its theme.
Serving its function from sundown to sunrise but idle in daylight, a streetlight is relegated to a part-time obsolescence in which it remains utterly useless; a situation quickly remedied by a supplementary role: the bearer of signs and messages, the effigy mantle of our advertising dreams.
The history of light and by extension our sense of sight is undoubtedly age-old. Light is invested with a plethora of connotations so deep-seated they pervade language and its construction of knowledge. A streetlight is the dispenser of an electromagnetic radiation, an object that cannot be perceived without the very substance that makes it possible to be seen. Stripped of all symbolic meaning, it stands in the naked splendor of its literalness.
The streetlight is coupled to another machine: the traffic light. Whereas the former provides an honorary service, the latter is an apparatus of control, a delegator of commands intended to be obeyed. Up a street corner, two devices are locked in a tandem, part law officer, part tour guide, pumping in unison the heart of the ordinary.
Worn out signifiers get dismantled but nothing remains free of meaning for too long. Is Diogenes still waving a lantern in broad daylight, searching for a real person The road is long and fraught with detours yet as every arrival marks a new departure, the destination of an arrow remains in its flight.
Selected Photographs
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