A Bridge Across Time

In the last blog post I mentally bridged the distance between the discovery of cave drawings created over 30,000 years ago and the discovery of OUBEY’s pictures, which were created in the last thirty years.

This comparison could be considered daring – if one is not familiar with the encounter between Prof. Dr. Schrenk, paleoanthropologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, and one of OUBEY’s pictures. There he bridges a far greater distance of time. For him, the picture he encounters is a “wonderful symbol for our connection with thousands of generations of our ancestors across more than seven million years.”

“These seven million years are in this picture”

Why should this not be the case? If pictures that a human being painted on the wall of a cave 30,000 years ago can so deeply touch our souls when we look at them, why should it not conversely also be possible that a picture created today carries the connection with the humanness of our ancestors so strongly in it that we can feel it and be touched by it, when we look at this picture? I do believe that this is possible. Art can cancel out the boundaries of time, and the freedom of emotion that can grow out of a direct encounter with art is the key to this.