surface 04

Surface means it's flat, it's two / 2 / dimensional. It hasn't any depth. A sheet of paper has no depth. An illusion of depth on a sheet of paper has no real depth, no surface to dig in. Same with a canvas, a stretched canvas has no depth, is a two dimensional surface and has two sides. It is a façade, like walls in buildings. The stretched canvas, the painting, is mostly hanging on a wall, it even can be a wall.
A film projection on a screen is 2 dimensional. A light-source projects the depth, the illusion, the narrative. Which opens possible wide horizons but it stays flat. We want to get beyond the surface? Beyond the boundary of the 2 dimensional? We want to get beyond the veil? Like in Plato's cave we want to escape from the boring and already to long known same old wisdoms.
I draw and scratch the drawing, it is making a relief, it is constructing a relief. Do we understand anything of the phenomenon surface? A thing so simple as a sheet of A4 paper. Is there anything to understand? Such a sheet with a format of 21 by 29,7 centimetres, white as snow, plane, smooth, 2 dimensional. Without depth, without bottom, nor sur - face, with two sides, often named front and backside. Carrier of messages of our mind. Boring or enchanting?
We, mankind, we are surface bound. It seems we live in space but are we? In a thin layer of air we have to behave ourselves, we have to survive. Dimensional seen it is almost nothing, it is as flat as the bas-relief palimpsests I am making.
Scratching in the surface to go through that first layer. Like digging a hole. But the illusion carriers in art aren't soil to dig in. It are surfaces with two sides like a coin, two opposite sides from the one and same object and never can reach. If it's perforated, if you go through the surface by making a hole you arrive in emptiness. Or going under the surface, by swimming deep in the water or by being dead and buried in the ground than we decompose and dissolve. Finally to be freed from perceiving.
But mostly we are living on the surface and we are working with surfaces. We are surface, we are superficial.