The Space That Remains, the 4th dimension, chapter 4 from The Works

After the still lifes, the work shifted.

In my second year at the monumental department, I was asked to paint the fourth dimension. Whatever that meant for me. I learned that it is not a physical space, but an awareness, a sense that reality exceeds what we can see at once. Mysticism entered almost simultaneously. Two simple notions: everything is one, and the one remains unknowable.

The first paintings were large and blue. Dense. Overloaded. Everything happening at once: lines, forms, movement. The whole disappeared. That was the turning point.

Instead of adding, I began to reduce. In a serie of monochrome paintings, I started to peel away layers, using less paint, revealing more of what lay beneath. From there I isolated fragments. Details taken from these works were enlarged into new paintings.

The work changed. The excess fell away. A fragment remained: suggesting a larger whole.

After a year, four blue-white paintings stood in the studio. Each showed only a part. And because of that, they opened something.

Around that time I encountered ideas on the fourth dimension in the work of Rudy Rucker —not something you can see directly, but something approached through fragments and projections.

It confirmed what was already happening. Only later did I understand what had entered.

Not emptiness as absence, but openness as a condition.

In Taoist thought, this is called Xu —not nothingness, but that which allows something to appear.

The image became a fragment. The fragment became a field.

And within that field, space itself became the subject.cNot something to depict,but something that holds everything together.

And within that space, something began to take form.

"Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;it is the empty center that makes it useful". Laozi

“In the smallest detail lies an infinite richness of form.” Charles H. Hinton