Cosmogonie 1961

Horia Damian made this painting called Cosmogonie using a palette of indigo, blues and whites. Imagine the studio, the canvas upright, the artist leaning in, improvising a lattice of marks, each dab a tiny universe in itself. Is it a vision of the cosmos, or the inside of a mind trying to make sense of it all? I wonder if Damian felt like he was mapping something, charting unknown territories with each brushstroke. I feel like he might have been thinking about the structure of everything, from the smallest atom to the largest galaxy, searching for a pattern, a rhythm in the chaos. Think about it, he takes these humble materials, paint and canvas, and turns them into a field of infinite possibility. He's in conversation with painters like Agnes Martin, who used grids and repetition to invoke the sublime, but he's also doing his own thing, pushing the boundaries of what paint can do. That’s what artists do, they keep the conversation going, inspiring each other across time. And in the end, paintings like this remind us that meaning is never fixed, it's something we create together, in the act of looking.