The Oubeyscope

There is the microscope, there is the telescope and now there is the Oubeyscope” someone recently wrote me who’d delved a little deeper in his thoughtful exploration of OUBEYs works and coined this new term in a flash of serendipity.

I really love the idea that this freshly minted term embodies so well because I think that it really does go straight to the heart of one vital aspect of OUBEYs creative drive. I would never by any stretch of the imagination have hit on such a happy neologism to describe what OUBEY reveals to us in his works, and I was thunderstruck with astonishment when I read it. Does it need any explanation? Now, explanations are not my strong point but I can’t resist the temptation to unravel this thought and take it a little further.

The microscope and the telescope show views of the smallest and the largest beings and structures in our universe and on this earth. What OUBEY reveals to us in his painting are the mysteries that lie behind the structures. His paintings open up a new way of viewing ourselves and our here and now on earth as part of a gigantic cosmic system. Such a perspective is neither pathetic nor romantic and certainly not dramatic. It’s simply there. And this is exactly how his paintings work. Like a channel that guides us past the tangled thickets of life and takes us through the portals of our innermost thoughts and feelings – paired with the new knowledge that research and science constantly gives. Such a trajectory has been my own experience, repeated again and again in the course of over 30 years, whenever I look at his paintings.

In the run-up to the fifth stopover of the Global Encounter Tour which will take place at the Central European University in Budapest tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, we posted all the paintings on show there on the social Web. One painting a day. And we companioned them with the videos of the encounters with the paintings made by people whose lives are dedicated to investigation of the same issues and areas of interest that were of such passionate concern to OUBEY. Extraordinary, wonderful individuals – just like OUBEY himself was.

And so once more I felt a particular closeness to these paintings. And once more the insights, associations and reactions of people encountering one of OUBEYs paintings on video sank deep into my mind. The joyful dance of past recollections and new insights they stirred in me was fascinating and astounding. Fritjof Capra once spoke of a “Cosmic Dance“.

The dance begins with the gaze through this burning glass that – to use OUBEYs own words – shows his paintings as “islands in the sea of thoughts and feelings.” Through his paintings you can not only see these islands but also visit and inhabit them in mind. From this perspective too, the neologism of the Oubeyscope in its own idiosyncratic way exactly hits the mark.

My grateful thanks to Charles Savage for his inspired neologism.