In Fünf Variattiohnen, meine Wenigkeit, den Affrika=Reisenden, Skt. Adolf II., Wölfli 1922

This elaborate drawing by Adolf Wölfli is teeming with imagery made with colored pencil, probably over many, many hours. It is so full of visual information, you could spend a lifetime exploring its depths. I can imagine Wölfli making this and getting lost in the intensity of it all. Building up the concentric circles with layer upon layer, he’s carving out a space of thought. I’m thinking about his own life, locked away, and this work becoming a kind of portal to somewhere else. The repeated motifs and obsessive detailing seem almost like a form of meditation, don't you think? The musical notations that surround the central figures are interesting because the language of music shares some of painting's non-representational qualities. The color palette has this crazy, beautiful intensity. He’s inventing a visual language that I think lives somewhere between representation and abstraction. His piece reminds us that art is a conversation across time, where each artist is inspired by the other, and, through the act of making, discovers new possibilities.