Cave Painting Number 5 and 6
In his impactful series of cave paintings, Varriano creates a physic bridge between conscious thought and the archaic repository of the unconscious. His is an essay that reveals the porous nature of time, the engrained desire of all living things to find self-expression, and the myriad modes of discourse that can exist between primordial forces, organic organisms, and consciousness.
Journeys into the deep, distant, cavernous depths of the psyche led him to explore the beginnings life. In those boundless regions, he felt himself called to bestow upon the earliest organisms, the ability to speak and convey in pictures what their limited organic structures do not allow them to expound in words.
The paintings, of course, can be understood in purely abstract and archetypal terms rather than a visual dissertation on Archean microbes. What remains intriguing and enigmatic for Varriano is whether, in the great sea of consciousness, a portion of the archaic images originated in the Precambrian Eon when the microscopic organisms that live around us and within us first formed. Buried in the deepest recesses of consciousness, perhaps it is these foundational, biological elements that try to communicate with us through a number of peculiar, fantastical, and powerful images that appear in dreams and delirium and within the minds of the prophets, mystics, sages, and artists called to serve as harbingers, messengers, and interpreters of the past and future. For Varriano, the vast spaces of the unconscious, provides, among others, portals to primordial, spiritual, structured, and biological realms. Art, myth, and depth psychology are the mediums through which such extraordinary, incredulous, and unconventional ideas can be probed and pondered.
John Varriano American Artist, "Cave Painting Number 5,"
2003, oil painting on canvas, 36' x 24'
In Cave Painting Number 5, Varriano gives us a work of explosive energy contrasted by calm repose. A serpentine head writhes and stirs within an interweaving pattern of asymmetrical forms that appear to possess astute cognitive awareness. The application of color is unctuous and applied with substantial thickness; and the paint has been allowed to drip and drag as though painted on calcareous rocks. The pigments maintain the appearance of minerals extracted from the earth, which gives the impression that they may have materialized from and through the solid rock rather than having been painted upon it.
Varriano gives us fluid, dawning lifeforms in Cave Painting Number 6 that quiver and tremble in various states of metamorphosis. Palpable intelligence seeps through the canvas encircling us in the wonderous aura of these marvelous, sentient organisms. The palette of pale pastels resonates with that of aged and faded pigments. Translucent washes of color impart the feeling that an effervescence of trace minerals is animating the work.
For the artist, life, in all its varied forms, seeks to know and be known— for its essence, for its purpose, and its virtue. In the role of spectator, we are called to witness and contemplate, and, in so doing, we participate in the great unfolding of creation and the expansion of consciousness and its yet unrealized abilities.
