Author Description

If one has been completely encircled by the ocean, one has no concept of the universe and one's relationship to the universe. As a landscape draftsman, I was inspired with entirely new thoughts by that large, simple line. Now Blinky Palermo was no landscape draftsman in the strict sense. But, to judge by the facts and anecdotes that have come down to us, he must have often felt completely encircled by the sea -- isolated and thrown back on his own resources. The large and simple line separating the here from the there, and thus becoming a border that must be crossed or overcome, strikes me (although I am not trying to psychologize this work) as an apt guideline; it can be a meaningful approach to Palermo's works, which are often so very remote, so far-removed, despite their self-evident presence. For here we have sensations in the true sense of the term: sensory events, which -- on the surface at least -- usually look like scientific specimens or models offering a problem that, so it seems, can be logically articulated. Yet during the analytical process, that problem increasingly defies any positivistic explanation, while more and more blatantly revealing its trinidaenz -- an anagram with which we effortlessly circumvent the problems with metaphysics and transcendence.