Agero Magazine

In 1508, under the protection of the severe Pope Julius II, Michelangelo (who had begun to sign by that time with the name “sculptor”, too) started, with confessed difficulty and against his inner impulses of a “carver”, the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican, a mural work that has remained unequalled in all the history of painting.

It was only Michelangelo who, 15 years later, managed to outrun himself when, at the insistence of Paul III, decided to paint, in 1537, the Last Judgement, the colossal fresco that covers the back wall of the chapel. It took Michelangelo four years to perfect his talent, taking it beyond the known boundaries of artistic audacity. We can see his exaggerated and energetic anthropomorphism everywhere: a superworld of muscular, naked athletes, either triumphant or damned. Nobody until him, and much time afterwards, had dared throw out of the sky the fearful and pious “flabbiness” that springs out of the Christian feeling of the being, and to replace it with the paranoid and arrogant “vigor” born out of his own Bible on Man. With Michelangelo, energetic personalism, if I am allowed the expression, reaches its artistic plenitude.

400 years later, Constantin Brancusi will “overthrow” the Renaissance artist’s grandiloquence by fiercely opposing it with a new paradigm of sculptural masterfulness, replacing the anthropomorphic with the scheumorphic. In other words, his art will voyage down into the abysm of the mind and the senses in order to reveal the Idea and the Symbol, united in the universality of the Form. Brancusi’s answer, like Einstein’s in Physics is, therefore, a new formula.

Die Gottesformel (God’s Formula) should be looked at starting with the second ground where Niram places a creationist diptych (the same canvas upside down as in The Law of Relativity): religion and science are now facing each other.  On the right side of this “painting within painting” the artist draw, after the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the birth of Adam, the first man. On the left, however, there is a Goddess (I think this may be the appropriate term) whose facial features hardly belong to the Renaissance and who releases Einstein’s formula of energy. Both Gods are surrounded by a retinue of infants and children. We are, without any doubt, in front of an artistic heresy. Is this a mere whim?  Of course not. The creation of the World is, according to Niram, double, fruit of the Supreme Couple (the masculine and the feminine as arch principles) who gives birth to the physical Universe (matter and energy), the Noetic (religion and science) Universe and the Human one (body and soul). With Niram, energy, science and alma (soul) are feminine, whereas earth (matter), the sacred (religion) and the body are masculine. The Universe, as well as the Man, is nothing but the germination of these interferences.

Allow me to transcribe, according to my knowledge, this niramian Genesis in 6 tempos (the clocks figured in the background).

1. In the beginning the Goddess created a small, dense and hot egg. The first hour.

2. And the space was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

3. And the Goddess said: “Let there be light!” And she set free the Formula of Energy into the emptiness. The egg exploded and divided the light from the darkness. The second hour.

4. And the Goddess saw that the Energy was good. And the Energy transformed itself into Matter.

5. And the first star was born. And then another one, and then thousands of thousands of stars. It was the New Year of the Universe. The third hour.

6. And then the Earth was born. And God called the dry land Earth and the Goddess called the gathering together of the waters Seas. It was late September. And they saw that it was good. The fourth hour.

7. And then God said to the Goddess: “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth”. And it was so.

8. And the earth brought forth, by will of the Goddess, grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and they saw that it was good. The fifth hour.

9. And then God said to the Goddess: “By your will, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven; and it was so.

10. And there were born the great whales in waters and the dinosaurs on Earth. It was the 26th of December, but the dinosaurs disappeared after four days, because they were too big and God and the Goddess saw it was not good. And it was so.

11.  And then God said to the Goddess: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth!” Time: 8 minutes until midnight, the last day of the year.

12.  So they created man in God’s own image, in the image of God created they him; and they created woman in the Goddess’ own image. And then they said unto them: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth!” The sixth hour.

13.  And on the seventh day God and the Goddess ended their work which they had made; and they rested on the seventh day from all their work which they had made.

The History of the World happens, in this “apocryphal” Genesis, condensed within an earthly year because we have almost a “synchrony” on the canvas. The background is, with Niram, the Universe itself where we can sense the curved space (graphically figured with primitive rhomboidal and radiant geometries, like on the Wallachian rugs), the infinite time (represented by the 6 clocks), Gamow’s big-bang and the Supreme Deity of Creation (the primordial feminine principle, Eve), resting, with her back turned, her image reflecting itself in her own space. The God of the Bible does not belong to this physical Universe but only to the “narrated” one of the human, creationist myth.

In the foreground of the painting, Niram transposes Brancusi’s The Beginning of the World, painted as in Cosmos. On it,  as if in a mirror, we can notice Einstein’s tables (the new Moses), with the First Law of Physics and the dictating finger of the Supreme Being (we note down, offhandedly, that the references to God’s hand or finger were “wiped out” from the Greek translation of the Old Testament). Indirectly, Niram proclaims a new world and a renewed credo. New visions will be perhaps imprinted upon the future canvas of human representations (the diptych), taking the place of the old, expired “icons” with already damaged edges. Nevertheless, man will continue to dream, create, hope, no matter what his answer to that “Where are we going?” may be.