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 Deja Vu, by Arthur Secunda
Deja Vu, by Arthur Secunda

Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda

Deja Vu is a strange and unquieting image, unique in my oeuvre. It is said that imagery comes from past experience or at least from something one might have seen or felt at one time or another. Yet this image, which I call Deja Vu (meaning "seen once upon a time" in French), is not something I recall having seen in this life. I've never been to Egypt, though I have done a lot of pyramidic shapes and triangles stemming originally from early studies of Cezanne.

The inferred geometry of the clearly defined verticals and horizontals, both in intense movement, zoom through the center of Deja Vu, then cross through the bottom by a band of warm, bluish pigment on a background of earth red. This stripe is literally depicted as a rounded band because of the lighter blended tone in its center. That highlight spreads across a good part of the band and lends an illusion of roundness. The red. blood-soaked earth is fragmented while the view of the pyramid is from a low vantage point. In a way, it's as if one is in a ditch looking out and up at a part of the tip of the pyramid, a disquieting sky looming in the background. The vertical stripes slithering down the center of the picture plane parallel with the black shadow of the pyramid are lightning-like. They are going into the sky and down through the earth.

Originally, Deja Vu was derived from two or three collages, one of which I believe I did in Germany in 1985. The pyramid was smaller and it may be that I needed a split in the background in order to butt some colored papers together. In other words, that lightning-like line may have grown out of a technical need for a vertical stripe to achieve continuity due to limited art papers and other resources on hand at the time and place. So a sort of Jack and the Beanstalk was born. Ultimately, when I printed Deja Vu in Paris Chez-Arcay, I refined the collage-imagery, simplified it, and focused on seven or eight elements that comprise the picture.

This picture has always been a mystery to me. For example, I could have given it any of a dozen titles, such as, "Approaching Storm," "Timelessness," The Ultimate Monument," "Ecstatic Moment," "Time Ticks Away," "Geometric Landscape," "Disturbing Dream," "Primordial Memory," etc. All of these titles seem to fit and yet Deja Vu implies (rightly) that this image has been stored away in my collective unconscious and fished out, as it were, as a collective personal catharsis. The image also implies a harbinger of things to come or imminent change. The shape itself has the look of a rhinoceros's nose, or some sort of rocky, organic weapon. And I think another part of its inner mystery comes from the fact that the black and its chartreuse counter-form are made up of solidity and soft space simultaneously. It's as if it's made of hard rock and gentle velvet at the same time. Thus there is a strange tactile parody there.

After living with this picture, I feel that somehow and somewhere a bomb is about to explode. Some dramatic phenomenon is about to occur. That's not an easy thing to describe or analyze in a picture or in life. Perhaps it's because the blends imply a soft curvature of the sky and also unseen movement - an approaching storm is implied. Meanwhile. the blue-green clouds are passing through and the lightning rod or beanstalk is passing through, and the rounded horizontal band across the bloody earth is passing through; but what's not passing through is the immovable, implacable pyramid monument. It's emblematic and corresponds to a stoic flag in its vastness. It clings as if forever to the picture plane with all these other transient events occurring around it: the lightning. the storm. the band at the bottom (a speeding train?) flashing by in a jet stream!

The Spanish baroque painters had a word, "terrabilidad," meaning the underlying element of dread, even terror, which came out of their dark, often black, shadows. The brilliant Spanish sun creates unexpected black shapes and shadows that one sees, especially in Andalusia. The history of Spanish art is replete with this quality of unstated emotion, and so it is possible that this intense black in Deja Vu, which is the absence of all color, is connected to the inner universe of this same feeling in Spanish art, which has influenced me so much.

The pyramid is illuminated. It's set in a dramatic, stage-like presentation. The pyramid shape is a classic monumental form used compositionally by renaissance artists and repeated in many variations through our present day. So, although the shape itself is not an innovation, there are other features that are: the color, the torn-edge look of contours of the shapes, for example. And the spontaneity of the rough-hewn forms, the earthiness that this torn, rough-edge look suggests - not to mention the very "perfect" blending of the sky, the lightning rod, the train whizzing by at the bottom - all this and more give off the effect of a dreamlike landscape in a frozen, timeless, momentary state of altered consciousness.

This is one of the most difficult pictures I've ever had to describe because of its simplicity and the absence of a clearly inspired reference to me. I don't remember ever seeing anything like this, and I can't say what events or experiences made it come out of me. Obviously, a churning cauldron of fragmented ideas were buried in my subconscious and when the time was right, the medium became the message at the moment of creation.

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