Oleg Dmitrovich Jefimenko
The creator turns the swirling rollercoaster of everyday experiences into something observable, devoting joys and sorrows otherwise lost to a precious entity that appears to justify a seemingly chaotic existence. For the observer, Art provides an escape from one’s own perspective, offering something fresh and new that speaks directly to self-interpretations, challenges perspectives, and gathers emotions and memories into something meaningful.
Naked reality can be careless about meaning, with no regard for sense and regularly stripping the little arguments we tell ourselves, capricious and neglectful of our plans. Maybe that’s why although breathtakingly complex and beautiful, we hesitate to consider natural elements as Art.
Take your time admiring this piece. Its balance, symmetrical harmony, and beauty evoke the originality of the composition—energetic yet soothing, chaotic yet delicate. Artists would categorize this in the range of Abstract Expressionism, though scientists would know it to be Magnetic Fields. In fact, this piece wasn’t painted; is the result of the dialog between nature and mind.
While observing this piece, consider nature’s stubborn laws, the fixed way of physics, and reality in the raw sense, ruthless and unchangeable. Now focus on those who designed the experiment, interacting with the universe, unveiling it, and yet part of it. As we admire it consider that we are the Big Bang’s sons and daughters, a stream of star-dusted particles, a universe complex enough to admire the universe’s complexity.
Did we just evoke an Artistic-Reality? This wonder towards the natural and mundane is easily suffocated by the demands of everyday life. We dismiss magnets as fridge decoration without further amazement. Of course, not being a scientist it is hard to see beyond that. I don’t know anything about magnetics, but I’ve been exposed to attraction.
Attraction is another natural, ruthless, and brutal way of nature. We often are impelled by it, crushed or divinized by its mysterious ways, and still we struggle to unveil it, make sense of it, and, unlike other laws of nature, admire it deeply. Attraction is, like Art and unlike magnets, a rather special way to provide meaning, as it puts us on both poles of the artistic dialog. We become the Creator, crafting our actions towards what attracts us, challenges and joys suddenly start to make sense in the bigger picture. We also become an Observer, receiving a new spectrum of perspectives that we want to carry and cherish as our own. In this dialog state of mind, everything is a coincidence, for in the chaos of nature we are contemplating meaning.
Maybe that’s the reason why, under the force field of attraction it’s so easy to enjoy the small patterns of the natural world and regard them as art: the crystal waves reflecting the sunset, the fine feathering wandering through dunes, or the song of a forgotten teapot. Our state of mind is one of artistic contemplation, looking for meaning, outside the painting, movie, or song, and inside the story we write for ourselves.
- Artur Deus Dionisio