Keys to the Kingdom (1994), chapter 10 from The Works

After the labyrinth another image entered the work.

Not the path,but the gate.

Until then my paintings had been searching for orientation: a movement toward a center that could be sensed but never fully seen. Now the attention shifted. What happens when you arrive?

The paintings that followed became layered. Not one image, but several stages within the same work. Forms repeated, changed, disappeared and returned again.A single shape could move through different states as if I were observing a thought gradually taking form.

I called the series Keys to the Kingdom.

Looking back I realize that the keys themselves never appeared. What appeared instead were thresholds. Doors. Gates. Passages. Openings.

Not architectural spaces but psychological ones.

Every journey eventually reaches a point where movement alone is no longer enough. The next step cannot be forced. Something else is required.

At the time, I was fascinated by the idea that every important transition demands the surrender of an old certainty. Not the acquisition of knowledge, but the willingness to let something fall away.

Perhaps that is why the paintings became increasingly reduced. The image was no longer describing an event. It was circling around a transformation.

Some forms resembled heads.Others became masks, seeds, or embryonic figures. None of them remained fixed.They were simply stages within a process.

The gate itself also changed.

Sometimes it appeared as architecture. Sometimes as an opening within the body. Sometimes as nothing more than an invisible boundary that could only be sensed.

Only much later did I recognize that this threshold had accompanied me all along.

The labyrinth had taught me that there is only one path.

These paintings suggested something else: that arriving at the gate does not guarantee entry.

The obstacle is rarely outside ourselves. The gate asks for another way of seeing.

Not more effort. Not greater certainty. But a different relationship to the unknown.

Looking back now I understand why these paintings felt so important. They marked the moment when the work shifted from searching for a place in the world to exploring the landscape of the mind.

The outer journey had quietly become an inner one.

"Strive to enter through the narrow gate."

Luke 13:24

"The door is round and open.Don't go back to sleep."

Rumi

The series consisted of four monumental paintings, conceived as a single work. Rather than depicting a single image, they follow one form as it gradually transforms through different states.