The Cross and the Center, 1991, chapter 7 from The Works

After the series Unio Mystica,another image entered the work.

Not the circle,but the cross.

Around 1991 I became fascinated by the Stations of the Cross found in churches and along old pilgrimage routes.I wanted to understand why this ancient sequence of images had survived for centuries,and what these stages of suffering might reveal beyond religion itself.

My search eventually led me to the Kollenberg in the south of the Netherlands,where an old outdoor crossway climbs slowly toward the chapel of Rosa of Lima.

Walking this route,stopping at each station,I began to understand that the cross was not only a symbol of suffering,but also a structure of consciousness.

The vertical line:the movement between earth and heaven.

The horizontal line:the world of opposites: joy and sorrow,love and loss,light and darkness.

At their intersection lies the center.

Again the same theme returned that had already appeared in Unio Mystica:the union of opposites.

But now it appeared in a more painful form.

The paintings became fragmented,falling,almost disintegrating.

Bodies twisted,collapsed,floated between presence and disappearance.

I was no longer painting unity itself,but the difficulty of reaching it.

What fascinated me most in the story of Christ was not martyrdom,but acceptance.

The willingness to carry the cross voluntarily.To accept fate without becoming its victim.

Slowly I began to understand the difference between pain and suffering.

Pain belongs to life.

Suffering begins when we resist what is.

From a gnostic perspective,the cross is not merely a symbol of torture,but the meeting point of opposites.

At the outer ends of the cross,everything seems divided beyond reconciliation.

But at the center there is stillness.

A point where opposites can coexist without destroying each other.

Perhaps that is why Christ dies at the center of the cross.

Not at the edges.

The paintings from this period emerged from that realization.

They were attempts to paint the fragile space between fragmentation and wholeness.

Not transcendence away from life,but a movement through it.

Again and again the same question returned:

How can we remain at the centerwhile the world pulls us toward the extremes?

“At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is.”

 T.S. Eliot

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Rainer Maria Rilke