AlphaDesigner Blogue

Good news this week. I’m drowned in with what seems to be a never ending pile of projects, my friends constantly try to distract me and take me out for a beer or two, the weather is horribly hot as if someone ripped this whole country and threw it in the middle of the Sahara desert, WordPress 2.6 came out and… oh, I have relaunched AlphaDesigner, my seven years old personal site which spent the last 3 years in a coma. it’s now nicely (or not so nicely) integrated with this blog and accessible from the menu on the top.

I realize this is enough stuff for a whole season of a middle budget soap opera. but I don’t have anything else to add right now because I am literary spent! It’s summertime and the living is busy.

I haven’t read many books in my life. First, because I can’t find the time and second - because I’m busy re-reading the ones that I’ve already read.

I think this is the third time I read Buñuel’s biography. First time I did it was for my exam in cinema history class and that was a long time ago but I still remember how impressed I was by it. Mostly because I expected to meet a guy who’s simply crazy and provocative but discovered a true human being (my apologies to all the crazy ones).

At the time it seemed like a paradox.

Now when I’m a bit older and hopefully a bit wiser I decided to read it again. Actually there was a choice - I wanted to read a director’s biography and I was able to choose between Milos Forman, Bergman and Buñuel. Forman is too boring for me, I don’t like his movies, and Bergman is too depressive. In a very bad way. Personally, I’ve always found genuine negativity repelling and Bergman’s lack of sense of humour is a huge turn off.

Buñuel is different. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, even in his suffering. That makes him bigger than life and far superior than the other two.

This one of my many collaborations with photographer Manel Ortega. It took me almost a year to complete. It’s a depiction of Lucifer and his alleged fall. Or - if you prefer - Pan and his alleged ascent. Whatever you choose, you won’t be wrong.

Myths have the power to morph and change as they travel from culture to culture and this one is among the most striking examples. Most of us know Lucifer (or Satan) through the various writings of the Abrahamic religions - Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Although his representation differs in each of them, as a whole, he appears in a negative aspect and in some cases is the antipode of the monotheistic God.

This seems as a paradox to me because if God is all-powerful then Satan shouldn’t be able to have any influence over God’s creations. However, we see this is not the case and Satan’s strength is so profound that he’s able to lead humanity into temptation and suffering. It’s a trap in which any monotheistic belief would fall because the notion of monotheism with its single, almighty deity directly opposes human intuition. And what human intuition says is that good and evil exist simultaneously and need each other as opposites.

Of course the subject of this post is not to clarify the plethora of religious contradictions but it’s important to mention because one conclusion that can be derived from all this charming nonsense is that Satan in monotheism actually relates to nature as it really is and God relates to nature as it should become in some point in the future, as we modify ourselves and our surrounding according to special prescriptions. This is quite apparent if we think about the most common depictions of Satan - horns, hoofs, a tail, hairy body… Did I hear Pan? And what does Pan stand for? Nature of course. In its most unapologetic aspect.

It’s funny but this artwork was started backwards - I began with the Pan idea and I ended up with Lucifer. I wanted to make some kind of a sequel to Atlas which had the heaven-vs-earth conflict at its core. Here, heaven is broken and nature is… as they say… king. :)