Falling Angels: chapter 5 from The Works

Chapter 5 — Falling Angels

From within that space, angels entered the work.

I did not choose them; they appeared.

In the early years,1988 to 1990, the work moved through different themes: dreams, movement, the body in motion, fragments of text, and ideas drawn from mysticism. I was searching for a language without yet knowing what it was.

The angel emerged from that search.

Their origin also goes back to a visit to Venice where I saw the amazing ceiling paintings of Titian and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Figures suspended in light, moving across ceilings, floating between heaven and earth.

Seen from below, held by another perspective. Something of that remained.

At first, I did not know what they were. They had no fixed form were neither male nor female, not fully present, not entirely gone. They seemed to exist in movement, often in groups of three, floating or falling.

For me, the angel was not a religious figure, but something undefined, a presence moving through another layer of reality. It carried associations of lightness, freedom, and weightlessness, untouched by obstacles. And yet, I painted them falling.

Something in them had lost balance, or perhaps had entered the world. That tension became central to the work. The figures hovered between states: not above, not below, suspended in a moment that did not resolve.

To understand what I was doing, I began to search. I read fragments of mysticism, philosophy, and ancient texts, searching for something I could not yet name.

But the work did not come from there.

Gradually it became clear that the angel was not something outside me, but a way of seeing, a position from which one can observe without being caught. A perspective from above, or from within, in which opposites no longer exclude each other.

The androgynous form became essential, not as an image but as an inner balance.

Around the same time, I began repeating a single form: a shape taken from a model drawing, used again and again. Not to define it, but to approach it. The figure never settled; it remained in transition, it was falling, or not yet fallen.

Looking back, these paintings were not about angels. They marked a threshold: between worlds, between duality and unity, between image and what could not yet be named.

And quietly, almost unnoticed, another space began to appear: an inner space, weightless and without time, where something shifts not by force, but by awareness.