ONNI NORDMAN Munich Project 2020

THE MAN IN THE SOUP

"We don't know who discovered water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't a fish", said McLuhan, attributing the words to an anonymous “someone”.

We are protein beings in the molecular world. All that we do and think and feel and dream is at one essential level a chemical reaction. Proteins are the fuel of life, they make life run, and life takes place in the elemental soup.

This is the new standard of perspective for the world that has taken shape in the last one hundred years. It is as radical a shift in understanding as was the invention of graphic perspective in the Renaissance, which led to Mercator projection, accurate maps for naval navigation, and thus the colonization of the Americas.

The constantly evolving frame of reference set by the New Physics and New Genetics shows us a world where physical and biological boundaries that were once fixed are now mutable and malleable.

The revelations of science --the empirical authentications of how the world works-- are so astonishing, so outlandish, so beyond belief when you encounter them, that you have to acknowledge that there's a whole new world in the world.

When you engage with scientists, however, it very quickly becomes clear that this wonder is the result of toil, of drudgery, of grueling experimentation, of hard work and intense thought that levels much of art down to size.

And yet art can go some distance to communicate what science does. It can help to bring the incredible into the realm of common sense, on the things we can agree on, on our common condition.

2.10 - 2.22 2020
oil, acrylic, watercolour, enamel on paper
76.2 x 55.9 cm