On the Unexplainable Expectation of Something to Happen

Mr K. got up later than usual, the clock pointed at 5, probably in the afternoon, because, even though everything was at its proper place, just as he had arranged it the evening before, the cup, the plate, the fruit and the vase they suddenly appeared different. Perhaps it was the light. The alarm clock though had stopped for sure, the reason why he woke up at the wrong time. He then became witness of a strange spectacle and he realised how things had a life of their own without him and he somehow didn’t dare to touch the cup, because it wasn’t there for him at the moment.

What Mr. K. experiences just like at the start of one of Kafka’s novels can also happen to us when we observe Saxer’s paintings. We feel as though we could take part in events which are happening without us as long as we don’t disturb them. We have perhaps in the daily rush knocked on a secret door which suddenly opens and reveals that same vase we thought to have known so well up to now. But now it appears displaced, like a powerful Brahman priest to have stood in the inner circle of a temple. And the space around it leads into further depths. Perhaps it stands in a world that hides another one. There are surfaces which cover and open up, like foolish fire created through strong tensions, and remaining as long as we stay there, reflect on it and disappearing as soon as we think to approach its solution.

If we look at the objects in Saxer’s paintings as materialist things, we still don’t know where they come from and where they are heading. This realisation remains our destiny which Heisenberg described scientifically : “We will never know both, location and time of the smallest elements simultaneously.”

There we stand in eager expectation, not to miss the instant, when the mystery is revealed, what the things on the paining will do next. Perhaps we feel related to the vase- once we realise that we aren’t just humans looking for the spiritual, but there are spiritual existences searching for the human.

Holger Dempwolff

 

Tranlation: Ruedi Jean-Richard