“That which is light is always closest to us and that which is dark is always furthest away from us”

This was one of the dictums in our old lyceum where I began to study art. Or at any rate, this is how I would translate the little I remember being taught amidst anxious attempts to reproduce the shapes of things in front of me.

Later I’ve learned that we can crash our bikes into something precisely because we keep looking at it to avoid it. So I tried to look away from everything that came close and kept staring into the distance, which was often dark, still I ended up at the library one day. 

I was in Amsterdam and my English wasn’t that good. I looked at the architecture first, and then at other buildings in book form. Modernism seemed attractive. Who wouldn’t want to be modern after all. Indeed, there wasn’t anything unfamiliar about the reproductions, more like incomprehensible in their flatness, although I doubt anyone ever questioned them precisely because of all that conventionality in the photographs. The Xerox machine sent rays of light sideways as it reproduced some of the pages, and it didn’t stop at the window. Isn’t it funny that darkness cannot enter a room the same way in which light is leaving?

The next day, once again I remembered the old days as I happened on a guy with painstakingly bitten nails. All the cute half moons were gone! He was still cute though, very cute, like a teenager. Oh, those starless moonless nights of sleepless youth, tirelessly reading E.M. Cioran’s “Treaty of Decomposition” or “A Short History of Decay” according to its official English form. 

It is wonderful that the highs and lows of our interior spaces, the disarray of our ideas is at all translatable into something palpable, not to mention the instances where many more variations are possible. Take the early modernists for instance, or the differences found in the studies of students, apparent as early as minutes into departure from the same model. 

I wondered what would the translation read like if I were to study the buildings from the pages I’ve copied out at the library, using that hopeful old rule according to which the bright parts of things are close by and conversely, their dark parts are further away?

But first I began with images of moons and the sun, or both, I don’t remember more than wanting to reproduce a bit that charming guy with his bitten nails as well. Then I took the reproductions of the sunny photographs from the library and used them as blue prints to outline the shapes painstakingly and anxiously, so that the dark parts of the architecture were built low and the bright parts were built high respectively. 

The results were pretty much incomprehensible but not unfamiliar. And I think I also wondered then whether to call the resulting group of works “Crashing with Modernism” or “Having a Crush on Modernism”. My English still wasn’t that good, but it gave me confidence to look ahead, trusting that others will be content with their own ways of reading them. There will be no questions, and I can avoid forever having to shed light like a Xerox machine over and perhaps a little bit beyond the relevant parts of this story.