Cosmogony

It is said that the coming of a new era is observed in a renewed way of seeing the cosmos. Starting with the vision of Ptolemy and passing through the heliocentrism of Copernicus, every cosmogeny has announced the coming of a new era. The first convinced the world that it was the center of the visible universe from antiquity until the Middle Ages. The second, by Copernicus, the heir of Plato, ushered in the modern era. Now we are witnessing the cosmogeny of space and the painter. By immersing ourselves in this painting, we are participants in a new perspective of the universe with its extraordinary formations and enormous dimensions that let us understand the triviality of humanity and the grandiosity of the imagination through science and art. The New Era of Aquarius, which seeks the fusion of science and art, is the cycle that is starting, and which portrays these galactic creations from the deep mountainous valleys of the Andes.

The Cosmogony collection of paintings by Bernardo Falconi makes us confront the reality of an astrophysical world from the painting imaginary in a voyage through quasars, nebulae, galaxies and planets depicted by an imagination that appears to be travelling through the cosmos like an argonaut who is looking for the golden fleece, the nectar of inspiration to navigate through the infinite limits of the universal soul though his symbolic lens.

The large and small format paintings that constitute Cosmogony connect us with an astronomical archetype in all the souls that travel constantly through planets and galaxies. Apparent in each painting, every perspective is a point of view of the mechanical vehicle that is the author´s perspective. From earliest antiquity, travel, as an initiation, has represented the possibility for the soul to travel through the secret hideouts of the spirit. The shaman, as a psychopomp, undertakes astral journeys through the cosmic tree that unites the three worlds: the first two being the physical world and the psychic world which assaults the great spiritual estates that constitute the third world of this sacred voyage. The magic flight of feathered men has been known among the Yumbos, Maya, Dakota and the Navajo. In The Odyssey, Ulysses embarks on a voyage that, in reality, is a return to his more essential being: Ithaca. Sudden trips or the rapture of the subtle body have also been discussed. Trips through other celestial bodies, suns and remote and uncharted planets, mysterious corners of the astral universe.  

We can commence the journey through Absorption, a painting which ensnares us in the energy vacuum that is a black hole, with its circular and concentric movements of torrents of energy left behind. Everything seems to emanate and return to the light through acrylic colors that make us experience the volume of form and immensity in a combinatorial analysis of aspects of the light left behind around the hole.

As cosmonauts, the center of the black hole transports us in a space capsule (which is none other than the perspective of the artist) that, like a large space telescope, observes the living and palpating forces of the universe: giant stars and novae, millions of times larger than the sun, such as Vesta and Helios, immense masses of light energy, printed like stamps on the paintings, appear to be magical imprints in spatial observation. An astronomical painting that spirits us to gaze upon the chiaroscuro limits of outer space.  

The painting of the planet Jupiter has a force that makes the palpitating gas colossus seem alive. Jupiter, the god of thunder, is the master of light and energy, elements that constitute cosmic matter. Jupiter, the great father of Roman mythology, the Zeus (sky) of the Greeks, is both the planet and universe, the father and the son.

The cosmic journey ends at the Earth which receives the photon rays from the cosmos. Perhaps solar winds or N rays? The electromagnetic impulse that floods the Earth with electrons that we see as rays that descend as the aurora borealis or the aurora australis and which we feel as changes in the biofield of the psyche is magnificent. The rays we perceive as the vibrational field of a universe that looks upon itself through the eyes of the artist. 

Galo Cevallos Rueda

January 2024

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