Completed Painting: 'The Castle/Le Grand Hotel 3'

'The Castle/Le Grand Hotel 3', Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2023

[Reconfigured/Translated Composite]:

Overall, from this distance, the castle corresponded to ideas. But then, in many ways, our time is eaten away by the idea of showing objects only with the things that really accompany them, stripping them of their essence - the thought that isolated them from reality in the first place. It’s really just a shitty little town. A horse-drawn tram, a café, passers-by crossing the square, a branch of the Sparkasse, are collapsing syllable by syllable into the void under the irresistible forces of external pressure and the supply of air. If only tourism, the whole trip would be in vain. He’d better go back to his old homeland, where he did not stay so long. This penchant for new places and new people is naturally woven into our forgetfulness of the oldest. Of course, he still expected the road to finally turn towards the castle, and just because he expected it, he kept going - not that the heart doesn't also benefit from the analgesic medicine of habit once such a divorce has been accomplished. Until then he was constantly suffering.

The fear and anxiety I felt as I lay beneath the unfamiliar, overly high ceiling was nothing more than a protest of my surviving attachment to the familiar, lower ceiling. But then again, it was not a roar, it was the singing of voices far, far away - as if from the hum a single high-pitched but powerful voice came out in some impossible way and struck the ear as if trying to penetrate deeper (than a bare ear). These impressions, mingled with those I would have experienced in that other place, in that similar street, and surrounded by all the accompanying feelings which were common to both states and to themselves  (free breathing, curiosity, joy, laziness, good appetite, cheerfulness, increasing volume, consistency of a kind of pleasure, almost a mode of existence that I have rarely had the opportunity to revisit, but in which resurrected memories mix with physically perceived reality with sufficient memories, imagination, intangible reality for these places), which I crossed to give me not only an aesthetic experience, but also an intoxicating desire, although fleeting, to live there forever. It may happen that one department regulates this and another that, without the knowledge of the other - and although the overall control is most accurate, it is naturally too late, so some confusion may still arise.

You are under constant surveillance it seems, and on each of these floors the golden glow on the carpet suggested the sunset was outside the bathroom windows. Don't think of barriers as a definitive dividing line. It is not the desire to be famous, but the habit of hard work that can make us a creative artist - so it is not the joy of the present, but the sober reflection of the past that can strengthen us, preserve the future (except in bad times). You think exactly. I could only see these landscapes as a selection of daily changing images, displayed randomly in the place where I am, but not necessarily related to it. Several paths lead to the castle. Now it will be fashionable for most people to use one, now another, and they will all join. The rules governing the change have yet to be discovered, but we are aware, as if we have entered a new element, that unknown pressures have changed the dimensions of our feeling and we can no longer look at it as before. We know it's still there somewhere, but it's gone, it doesn't bother us anymore, it's content with the feeling that the presence gives it like a sensation that also satisfies us because we don't care… not here.

(With thanks to Franz Kafka & Marcel Proust)