When Words Fall Silent, chapter 38 from The Works

By 2025, something unexpected began to happen.

The poems slowly disappeared.

Not because I abandoned them, but because I no longer needed to make them visible.

In 2024 I had woven poems into my paintings in Russian, Armenian, Sanskrit, Chinese and English. I was fascinated by the beauty of different alphabets and by the way language could become part of the image itself. The poems were no longer written beside the painting; they had become the painting.

But my search did not stop there.

I had never been interested in language as information. What fascinated me was the space beyond language—the place where words lose their certainty and become rhythm, movement and silence.

To explore this, I began photographing small details of the paintings. Fragments of letters, traces of poems, pieces of colour and texture. Enlarged, they became something entirely different.

The words disappeared.

What remained was their echo.

Looking back, I realise this was another encounter with Babel.

Not as a story about confusion, but as a longing to move beyond the limits of language itself.

When no one can read the words anymore, everyone begins in the same place.

There is nothing left to translate.

Only to experience.

The letters dissolved into lines.

The poems became landscapes.

Language became texture.

Painting became its own language again.

At the same time another old companion quietly returned.

For many years I had been fascinated by the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, the ancient Zen story describing the journey towards awakening. Earlier I had painted the series almost literally, following the traditional stages.

Now they appeared differently.

The small silhouettes of the ox and the herdsman found their way back into the paintings, almost unnoticed, becoming part of a larger landscape. They were no longer illustrations of a story, but traces of an inner journey. Alongside them appeared the rings of a tree, suggesting the passing of time, growth and memory. Through the painting a pale path slowly emerged, connecting the different elements as if the journey itself had become visible.

Looking back, I realise this painting brought many of the themes of the previous years together.

The circles.

The poems.

The languages.

The Ox.

The path.

Not as separate ideas, but as one continuous movement.

Perhaps this was where my search had been leading all along.

Not towards another language.

But beyond language.

Not towards explaining the world.

But towards creating a space in which words could finally fall silent.

And perhaps, only then, could painting begin to speak.

Looking back, I realised that I had already described this search in one of my very first blogs.

I use foreign languages and characters not to obscure meaning but to encourage a different way of seeing. When words are unreadable, they become pure form—inviting the viewer to experience rather than analyse.

At the time, I saw it as an intention.

Only later did I understand that it had become my practice.

The poems gradually disappeared.

The alphabets dissolved into rhythm.

The viewer was no longer asked to read, but simply to look.

Perhaps that had been the destination from the very beginning.

Not to explain the journey.

But to make it visible.

One of the paintings from this period revealed something that had been present all along: a hidden path. It was no longer only an idea behind the work; it had become visible within the painting itself.