Marvin and I met in the studio. He is a painter, too, currently developing an abstract series. The paintings are multi-layered: Collage pieces poured over with acrylics, fine black lines tying areas together here and there, spray paint covering up other parts, and bold brush strokes adding finishing touches.

“Everything is a dance of causalities, not just in the third dimension”, Marvin said. “When I paint pictures like this one”, he pointed to his current work-i-progress, “in my mind, those paintings form a series called Reality. I believe that's how it all works, in a very abstract way, of course. I find it so exciting when people look at my paintings and see something completely different than I do. Everyone has a different perspective, and yet all are true at the same time. Whenever someone sees something new, some element of their perspective sticks with me, and then the painting takes on new meanings for me – adding meaning rather than replacing previous meaning. The image becomes richer with every perspective.”

“In fact”, he continued, “I believe that nothing is particularly certain — neither the meaning of a painting nor anything in reality, truly. Some people hold totalitarian opinions, in the sense that ‘this is absolutely the way it is’, like, ‘There is God, and when I die, I go to hell, and when the apple detaches from the tree, it falls down.’ Personally, I always try to allow myself a certain degree of interpretive flexibility, a certain fluidity in things, so that there isn't just one correct view, but many views that can be correct in their own way. Even if they contradict each other, they can still be correct. And if they aren't understandable or comprehensible to me, that doesn't mean they aren't right.”

“In order to gain understanding, I find the scientific method quite useful and try to apply it, but I'm wary when people use the term ‘scientifically proven’. A few hundred years ago, science knew that the Earth was flat. And we're always learning something new, perhaps forever. Nevertheless, I hold a belief that's based more on faith than on any ‘scientifically collected facts’; namely, that:

What we humans experience here, what all living beings in this reality experience, everything imaginable that can happen is meant to happen, sooner or later. Everyone has a path in life and a few things to experience, learn, and do. I don't believe that when we die, it's all over. I'm quite certain that our human experience is a very small part of a larger, complex system. We are part of something bigger and are repeatedly split off, temporarily, to continue experiencing and learning things before reuniting with the whole.

And I believe that all of this is beyond anyone's grasp. There will always be a great deal that we don't see or understand. And it helps to accept that.”

His core belief? Being independent. When I re-read Marvin’s words, I realised that “being independent” did not get mentioned verbatim. Yet, somehow, it ties all his thoughts together. Perspectives being independent from one another, truths being independent from one another, multi-layered material art practice as an expression of multi-layered perspectives on life. Finding and following one’s own path in life, a path providing certain perspectives, interlacing with others, yet independent of other paths that are true in their own right.

Of course, I was tempted to mimic Marvin’s series when developing his smallest – simply because there seems to be no better way to express his complex belief than the series “Reality”. Yet, I had to come up with something new, a different perspective, something equally “correct”.


Marvin’s smallest consists of many layers.

The first layer is the canvas itself, the basic structure of life within which reality takes place.

The second layer is clay, a soft yet strong cover, rounding the edges and enabling the co-existence of many different facets pointing in many different directions, not just planes in 90° angles.

The third and subsequent layers consist collage pieces from a paper I ripped apart just like parts of something bigger split off, a paper I covered in shiny water colours. The coloured droplets intermingled presumably accidentally, but there is some structure and logic to their diffusion – just beyond our human grasp. When you turn the smallest, every perspective makes new paper flakes shine.

Lastly, I added two glittering rhombs like eyes, and each rhomb consists of smaller 3-dimensional pyramid stones that again in themselves change colour depending on your perspective.