Alexandros Papadiamantis / His Shadow – No. 20

2024

glue with sawdust, pigment powders and oils on wood

80 x 60 cm

Who reads your language now?

Who tends to your world?

Your faith? Other times, and we are other now.

For days I have been bent over palimpsest wood,

filling its holes, cracks and crevices with sawdust and glue,

following its grain, hoping to level it out enough

to blacken it, to let it disappear, to make it fade.

I imagined a bright line tracing your shadow up there.

Nothing else.

Then came the mauve, all on its own, like a faded cassock,

painting the face too, against the flesh and into the soul.

Dioxazine, muted with black, ultramarine and white.

Now and then the brush carried ochre—

perhaps it had picked up a little rust—

just enough for the shadow to emerge from the dark.

Night.

I see you.