Panta rhei
60 x 60 cm
1992
‘One of the very first real Meta-paintings, Panta rhei, is brimming with a childlike vitality, which expresses itself in a most shameless way in naive coloured stars.
This small painting is a real Meta-painting, because the background and the little bars are finding themselves in an atmosphere of deep contemplation, causing the naive stars to root in a most paradoxical situation that makes us doubt over and over about what state of mind is actually displayed here. The painting is gay. But it is also the opposite of gay.
At the moment I see Pantha rhei, together with There once was, which is also full of sheer childlike vitality, as the, literally, celebration of the youth of Meta-art.
In 1992 Marianne Schuit discovered how she, thanks to the abstraction, could get to where the impossible could be turned into the possible.
At last!
And this had to be celebrated. Obviously.
In these two small Meta-paintings this celebration is still taking on a more or less understandable character. In another small very early Meta-painting, Break-through, the colouring does in no way show anything of the enthusiasm because of the fact that the Meta-artist had found the escape route to the much needed nonsensical.
What this small Meta-painting does show is that this escape route towards the nonsensical – how could it be otherwise?... – is highly nonsensical itself: not a breaking-through of boundaries, but a simple transcending of such boundaries, a total neglect of any limitations...’
From the chapter Vitality,
from the book Meta-art
by Mick van Schooneveld
