Gravity

If you lie down on the ground and gaze up in the sky, the experience of gravitational pull becomes simultaneously an experience of perpendicular depth. In other words It is an acute awareness of 3 dimensional depth/space. Being thus stationary also emphasizes the sense of perspective.
Now if we add movement to the equation something interesting happens:
One morning in Washington D.C. I was coming out of the subway station at Dupoint Circle. The exit led through this tunnel on an inclined plane, traveling by escalator up towards the street level through an oval shaped opening. The feeling was that of moving “towards”. Here up and down loose meaning. The perspective becomes the dominant factor regardless of gravitational pull. In art this is the relation between the figure and the horizon.
From the point of view of the earth, the notion of the direction “upwards” could just as accurately be named “outward”. Up and down thus become functions of the (human?) figure. Above and Below. Heaven and Hell.
I am the figure in my work, and/or the viewer is as he assumes my position in relation to the painting that is being gazed upon.
The figure is in movement, performing an action:
A thick black paint paste is hurled at the surface, expelled outward. A “Black Angel” is coming. He is inciting us: “Speak, Brother, Speak”. Sing up , sing out.

A loss of gravity is a sense of euphoria, levitation, soaring freedom.
At the opposite end of this, there is the nightmarish experience of space closing in. I sometimes have lucid dreams of vistas opening up momentarily only to reveal yet another barrier to smash, a wall to go through.

In painting the celestial and the terrestrial merge or trade places. Sky becomes earth, earth becomes sky.

Madeleine Hatz
New York, 2005