The Thalassic Sun: The Dark Root of Form

Spearfishing in the inner reaches of Saltstraumen, the world’s strongest tidal current, I dove into a cathedral of cold and darkness. These underwater cliffs, shaped by centuries of hydrodynamic violence, resembled a desert of the deep—a wet strata of bone and silence. Hours passed. I drifted in focused stillness, tracing with my gaze the slow currents over the seafloor when suddenly the ground itself began to move. A silver lozenge shifted against the sediment: a halibut, over 170 cm long, gliding across the deep in deliberate oscillations, vanishing and reappearing like a spirit.

There was no linear sequence, no thought. Only perception contorting into intuition. The halibut was not simply camouflaged; it was one with the ground. Its geometry was inseparable from the field it inhabited. I saw, and then did not see. It emerged not as object, but as event. This was not a hunt. It was a phenomenological encounter.

The fish crystallized. I dove. As I harpooned it in the triangle behind the eyes, I failed to unhook my belt from the line. Dragged downward with the force of a siphon, it was as if I had tied myself to a thunderbolt of lead. The body of the fish became a current. My own body became conduction. In the maelstrom's mouth, I tore free and resurfaced.

What unfolded was not merely a pursuit, but a chiasm—a moment where the figure and ground reversed, crossed, and returned. The halibut emerged not from the sea floor, but as the sea floor; her geometry not imposed, but latent, waiting to be read. It was not her appearance that struck me, but the event of her emergence—a shimmer in the field, a brief tear in concealment.

This is the rhythm I follow: emergence and retreat, clarity and eclipse, eros and veiling. The body—often my own, often female, hybridized, or cosmic—does not appear as subject, but as intensity, curvature, energy. It pulses at the threshold. It shimmers in the fold.

Plato's sun cast shadows into the cave. But the thalassic sun erupts from below—a reversal, a chiasm—revealing not a form above reality, but a light within it.

The dark ground as ontological field
My practice has long revolved around the dialectics of concealment and revelation, where forms do not declare themselves, but instead rise out of veiled grounds. The body emerges like the halibut: not as subject, but as intensity, curvature, energy. There is always a shimmer, a threshold, a vibration between the seen and the veiled.

In my visual cosmology, this encounter becomes myth. The halibut is the thalassic sun, an inverted Platonic form not descending from an abstract realm above, but rising from Earth’s belly below. Plato’s sun illuminates the cave; mine is submerged, camouflaged, and magnetic. The animal body is not just a figure; it is a portal of geometry. A diagram of force.

The dark root of form
The volcanic iron I now use in my works—often sourced from Iceland, the Atlas Mountains, or oceanic ridges—is not symbolic, it is literal. It is a transmitter of the earth’s memory. Applied to charcoal drawings, it becomes the medium through which ground and figure collapse into one another. The act of drawing becomes not composition, but conduction. Not expression, but eruption.

This is what I seek: a short-circuit between signifier and signified. A collapsing of symbolic order into energetic presence. A drawing that does not represent, but channels. The movement of the iron across the fixed image is not decoration; it is an act of becoming. It restores the event-character of vision.

A practice of descent
The halibut encounter was an initiation. It reminded me that my ontology is not speculative, but experiential. It is the dark root of form—the hidden geometries that emerge from direct contact with the world, not through ideas, but through acts. This is not narrative. This is mythos in the flesh.

And so I return to the studio, as I did to the sea. With pigments forged in geological trauma. With a memory of the siphon. With a hand that no longer seeks to render the world, but to enter its field. To inscribe the thalassic sun’s brief shimmer before it disappears again beneath the ground.

This is the darkness I serve. This is the radiance I follow.

The drawing does not represent. It emerges. It disappears. It leaves only a trace—the gleam of the pearl, seen once, before it sinks again beneath the ground.

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