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In the stillness of the inanimate, truth breathes without distortion.
A silent object becomes the deepest mirror of reality —
where meaning exists before language.
To stare into death is not to surrender to darkness, but to awaken within light.
Death is not the opposite of life; it is its hidden contour — the silent horizon that gives meaning to every breath.
In contemplating mortality, we do not abandon life; we begin to inhabit it more truthfully.
This sculpture was created on the themes of towers and existentialism. It was inspired by facticity within existentialism, which claims there are things in life that affect us which we cannot change. One of these things in particular is genetics. While our genetics make us individuals, they also affect what sort of life we may lead.
45cm X 15cm
Wood, Leather-hard Clay
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
Random sheet of paper in Paris w/ an Albert Camus famous quote :"in the midst of Winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible Summer"
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ijustdontknow: #冬
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safelipesa: J'aime Camus !
ijustdontknow: @safelipesa oui moi aussi...
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Nearness is one of the easiest things in the world to misread. Two people can occupy the same bench, the same bed, the same room, the same conversation, and yet remain separated by an interval no measurement can capture. This image turns toward that concealed form of distance. The booth encloses them. The lighting is warm. Their bodies sit within reach of one another. Nothing outwardly violent has occurred. No argument breaks the scene open. No gesture announces rupture. And yet the image is governed by a fact more decisive than proximity: they are not arriving in the same world. The space between them is not spatial in the literal sense. It is existential. It is the distance between two centers of consciousness that have not, in this moment, come into shared presence.
That distinction belongs deeply to the lived-world of Confessions to the Empty Chair. The book repeatedly resists the sentimental assumption that closeness guarantees communion. It understands that human relations are not secured by adjacency alone. A person may be physically present while inwardly withheld, distracted, defended, dispersed, or inaccessible to the one beside him. Another may sit inches away and yet remain unreachable because the deeper form of presence has not been given. The world of the book is full of such tensions. It treats intimacy not as a matter of coordinates, but as a matter of arrival. To arrive before another person means more than to show up bodily. It means to be inwardly there. It means that attention, vulnerability, memory, and selfhood are not wandering elsewhere while the body keeps the appointment.
Phenomenologically, this matters because embodiment is never merely physical occupancy. Human beings do not only take up space. They inhabit worlds of concern, anticipation, fear, desire, and private meaning. One can therefore share a table without sharing a world. One can hear the same ambient sounds, see the same reflected lights in the window, and still live through entirely different realities. The image preserves this truth through restraint. The man looks outward into the night. The woman turns downward and away. Neither is theatrical. Neither appears broken. The force of the image lies precisely in the absence of spectacle. Their separation is not dramatic enough to attract casual notice, but it is deep enough to govern the atmosphere. This is how existential distance often appears: not as explosion, but as quiet non-coincidence.
In Confessions to the Empty Chair, such non-coincidence is never trivial. The self is shaped by failed arrivals as much as by successful ones. To remain un-met while seated beside another person produces a particular kind of loneliness, one more unsettling than solitude itself. Solitude at least tells the truth plainly. Misaligned nearness can create the illusion of communion without its substance. It can conceal absence beneath the visual signs of togetherness. This is one reason the image’s enclosed setting matters. A booth or train compartment is designed to compress human beings into shared space. It reduces physical distance. But this reduction only sharpens the paradox. When closeness does not produce meeting, the failure becomes more visible precisely because the bodies seem so near.
Psychologically, the image touches on a painful but common fact: people do not merely hunger for company; they hunger for recognition, attunement, and participation in a shared field of meaning. To be next to someone who is elsewhere in spirit is not simply disappointing. It can destabilize one’s own sense of reality. One begins to ask whether the connection was ever mutual, whether the silence means withdrawal, whether affection, memory, expectation, and presence were ever held in common. Such questions rarely announce themselves loudly. They gather in the atmosphere first. That is what this image captures. The misalignment is felt before it is verbalized. The body notices before the mind names. The room, though outwardly intact, has already been rearranged by inward divergence.
There is also a theological resonance here. Human beings often confuse forms with fulfillment. We mistake the appearance of relation for relation itself. We assume that because something resembles communion from the outside, it must contain it inwardly. But much of spiritual and moral maturity consists in learning to distinguish proximity from presence, familiarity from love, coexistence from encounter. Confessions to the Empty Chair is attentive to this discipline of discernment. It knows that some of the deepest absences in life occur not when no one is near, but when someone is near without truly giving himself. The soul learns, often painfully, that presence is a gift of attention and interior availability, not a simple consequence of shared location.
The warmth of the image intensifies rather than softens the truth. Warm light traditionally suggests intimacy, comfort, or mutual belonging. Here it surrounds two people who nevertheless remain apart. That dissonance matters. It reveals how easily external conditions can imitate interior unity without producing it. The world can look relational while failing to become relation. The scene can be composed like closeness while inhabited like separation. This is one of the quiet tragedies the book understands well: human beings often know how to remain beside one another longer than they know how to arrive before one another truthfully.
“Distance Does Not Require Space” therefore names more than emotional disconnection. It names a structure of human existence. Persons are not joined automatically by nearness, because personhood is deeper than placement. A body may sit down before another body while the self remains elsewhere—guarding itself, grieving elsewhere, longing elsewhere, interpreting elsewhere, or no longer trusting the space enough to enter it fully. That is why the image carries weight without overt sadness. It is not portraying collapse. It is portraying the more common and more difficult reality of coexistence without meeting.
In the world of Confessions to the Empty Chair, such moments matter because they expose the difference between being with and being there. That difference can define relationships, memories, losses, and the soul’s understanding of what communion actually is. The image leaves the booth intact, the window lit, the bodies close, the night still unfolding outside. Yet everything essential has already been decided by a deeper fact: no amount of reduced mileage can overcome the distance that opens when two inward lives fail, however quietly, to arrive together.
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
Das Bild zeigt eines der verstörendsten Meisterwerke der Kunstgeschichte: „Der Leichnam Christi im Grabe“ (auch „Der tote Christus im Grab“), gemalt von Hans Holbein dem Jüngeren zwischen 1521 und 1522. [1, 2]
Es ist bekannt für seinen radikalen Realismus und seine ungewöhnlichen Dimensionen (ca. 30,5 cm hoch und 2 Meter breit), die der Größe eines echten Särges entsprechen. [1, 2]
Hintergründe und Bedeutung
Radikaler Realismus: Im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen Darstellungen zeigt Holbein Christus ohne göttliche Verklärung. Der Körper weist deutliche Anzeichen der Verwesung auf, wie die grünliche Hautfärbung an Gesicht, Händen und Füßen.
Religiöser Kontext: Das Werk entstand während der frühen Reformationszeit in Basel. Es betont die menschliche Natur Christi (kenosis – die Entäußerung Gottes in die Menschheit) und konfrontiert den Betrachter direkt mit der Unausweichlichkeit des Todes.
Symbolik: Ein besonderes Detail ist der ausgestreckte Mittelfinger der rechten Hand. Einige Interpreten sehen darin einen Hinweis auf die Auferstehung am dritten Tag (der dritte Finger), während andere es als rein anatomische Folge der Totenstarre deuten. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Die Wirkung auf Dostojewski
Besonders berühmt ist die Reaktion des russischen Schriftstellers Fjodor Dostojewski, der das Bild 1867 im Kunstmuseum Basel sah. [1, 2]
Seine Frau Anna berichtete, er sei wie erstarrt vor dem Bild stehen geblieben und habe sogar einen Stuhl benutzt, um es näher zu betrachten.
In seinem Roman „Der Idiot“ lässt er die Figur Fürst Myschkin sagen: „Von diesem Bild kann mancher den Glauben verlieren“. Für Dostojewski stellte die extreme Menschlichkeit und „Endgültigkeit“ des Todes in diesem Bild die Hoffnung auf die Auferstehung auf eine harte Probe. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Das Originalgemälde befindet sich heute im Kunstmuseum Basel.
#HansHolbein #Holbein #DeadChrist #ChristInTheTomb #RenaissanceArt #ArtHistory #Masterpiece #ClassicalArt #OldMasters #Painting #Realism #RadicalRealism #MementoMori #Vanitas #HumanCondition #Mortality #PhilosophyOfArt #Existentialism #JesusChrist #ReligiousArt #ChristianArt #Reformation #FaithAndDoubt #SpiritualArt #BiblicalArt #Basel #KunstmuseumBasel #SwitzerlandArt #Dostoevsky
This is my second line of enquiry - The absurd in existentialism. Absurdism is the human tendency to try and find meaning in life conflicting with the human inability to find any.
In short, life is futile until we give meaning to it.
With this in mind I wanted to present a chair (which we have given a very simple 'purpose') and completely hide or enclose the image. Changing its purpose and its 'meaning'.
Inspired by Chiharu Shiota.
"Huis Clos" Play Rehearsal In Progress. Follow us www.mesmeriseme.co.uk/what-is-hell, twitter.com/#!/HuisClos_2011, www.facebook.com/pages/Huis-Clos-MesmeriseMe-2011/1212970...
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
Should we worry about our existence, or just read Camus?
Albert Camus, the French philosopher, author, and journalist, is our Author of the Week.
"Huis Clos" Play Rehearsal In Progress. Follow us www.mesmeriseme.co.uk/what-is-hell, twitter.com/#!/HuisClos_2011, www.facebook.com/pages/Huis-Clos-MesmeriseMe-2011/1212970...