"Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are."
- Guy Larameé
In my attempt to find out who the 21st master artists are, I stumbled upon an artist named Guy Larameé, a Montreal-based artist who uses a sandblaster to carve on books.
I was surprised to see that his views on progress and knowledge are almost the same - that the way we perceive our progress is defined by our fascination on consciousness, that we are, infact, have not greatly evolved into greater being, but less of a being. We always seek to find out what's beyond the unknown, the journey to attain ultimate knowledge. That through accumulation, we are encouraging erosion, erosion of the truths of what we really are.
We begin to establish walls of what should be, of the things appropriate and are not. We put ourselves in categories only to fulfill our thirst to be greater than others. We create walls to protect us not from danger, but from the truth, that we are nothing compared to vastness of the world.
We label things as acceptable, but the underlying fact is that, we are harboring destruction, anger, wrath - ira. Ira is pretty much what entails Larameé's art, that "mountains of deserted knowledge, of disused
books, should be restored back to what they really are: mountains".
I was struck by his statement on erosion, "Mountains erode and become hills, then they flatten and become fields, where nothing happens - where encyclopedias erode to which that does not need say anything, that which simply is." Our mountains of fascination will soon flatten into fields of nothingness, by then, we don't have to say what we are, we'll simply be what we are. Nothing more, nothing less.
