Patriot (Platonian Landscapes)

2022
Acrylic and quartz sand on Fabriano paper
30 x 35 cm

Works on paper exploring the charged nature of places. These works are based upon a quote from Henry Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer. “It's best to keep America just like that,” Miller writes: “always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled...It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you given to an abstract idea... “

Places (countries and border-bound territories) do not actually exist. They are figments of our imagination; points in space towards which we may direct our affections, fears, and longings. A country consists not of whatever lies within its borders, but of the fleeting ideas and experiences of its (temporary) inhabitants. To conceive of a place is nothing but an imaginative exercise in which a collective add value onto an arbitrary idea that happens to exist at a certain time and place. 

To be a patriot, therefore, is to be vigorously devoted to a place whose characteristics (politics, purpose) only exist within one’s imagination. It is a longing towards an ideal that never existed nor ever will exist: a hypothetical landscape that, although unattainable, may nevertheless grant solace in weak moments.