Sometimes a symbol appears and I do not know what it means.
It may emerge during meditation, appear in a painting, or simply settle somewhere in my memory without any obvious reason for remaining there. Some have stayed with me for years. This does not mean that I spend all that time searching for them or trying to decipher them. They simply remain alive somewhere in my mind.
They may reappear in another image, in a work of art, in a conversation, or even in something I encounter in the outside world. I recognise them immediately, even if I still cannot explain why they matter.
I have learned not to force the answer.
Because something strange has also happened to me: after a long time, sometimes years, a connection appears that I could not see before, and suddenly I understand.
And when it happens, it does not feel as though I have chosen between several possible interpretations. There is an immediate sense of recognition. An absolute inner certainty: this was it.
I cannot demonstrate that this certainty reveals anything that exists beyond my own mind. That is another question. But the experience has made me wonder about the distance that can exist between the appearance of an image and our ability to understand it.
Can a symbol appear before we have the experience necessary to interpret it?
Or are we the ones who gradually construct its meaning over time?
Sign and Symbol
We tend to treat symbols as though they were codes we could learn to decipher.
The serpent means transformation. Gold means perfection. The circle means totality.
We learn the correspondence and it seems that we have solved the symbol.
But I can know perfectly well the historical or theoretical meaning of an image and still not understand what it means to me.
A sign works differently. A red traffic light has an established function, and it is useful precisely because it reduces ambiguity. I do not need to ask myself what that red means to me every time I reach a traffic light.
A symbol, however, can contain more than one relationship at the same time.
A serpent may be associated with danger, renewal, knowledge, sexuality or cyclic time. These associations may come from different cultures, religions and mythologies and yet meet within the same image.
But something is still missing.
Because when that image enters our personal experience, another story begins.
When an Image Acquires Our History
Perhaps a symbol can acquire meaning in a way similar to music.
A song can simply be a song.
We hear it and perhaps we even like it, but there is no particular bond between us and the music.
Until one day we fall in love.
That person shares the song with us somewhere, at a particular moment, and something happens. The song has not changed. The notes are the same, the rhythm is the same, but now something has become attached to it.
A person.
A place.
An emotion.
A fragment of our history.
Years later, a few seconds of that same song may be enough to bring everything back.
The music has become a point of access.
I wonder whether something similar happens with symbols.
An image may already have a collective history before it reaches us. But from the moment it enters our experience, our mind begins to establish new relationships around it. Memories, emotions, events and other images become attached to it.
The symbol retains its history, but it also begins to acquire ours.
Perhaps this is why knowing the theoretical meaning of a symbol is not always enough to understand what it means when it appears within us.
A dictionary of symbols can tell me what the serpent has meant to others.
It cannot tell me what has become attached to the serpent within me.
The Image Before the Concept
We tend to think that understanding something means being able to explain it in words.
But I am not sure it always happens in that order.
An image can produce a reaction before we know how to explain why. We perceive symmetry, fracture, repetition, darkness, proximity or movement before constructing a coherent account of what we are seeing.
There is no need to turn this into something mystical. Our minds do not process reality exclusively through language. They recognise patterns, establish associations and respond emotionally before all of this can become a conscious explanation.
An image may therefore be intelligible without yet being fully explainable.
Carl Jung used the concept of the symbol to refer to an expression that points beyond what consciousness is able to formulate at a particular moment. Whether or not we accept the entire architecture of analytical psychology, I find this idea particularly interesting.
Because it leaves the symbol open.
It does not immediately turn it into a diagnosis or a universal formula.
Perhaps a symbol can point precisely to the limit of what we are able to explain at a particular moment.
And that limit can move.
Personal Memory and Collective Form
No image seems to be entirely private or entirely collective.
I may use gold because I am physically fascinated by its luminosity while, at the same time, working with a material carrying centuries of religious, economic and alchemical associations.
Another person will look at that same gold through their own history.
So who does the meaning belong to?
I do not think the artist can control it completely, but neither do I think that every interpretation is equally valid.
The work is there.
It has materials, decisions, repetitions, internal relationships. An interpretation should be able to return to the work and find something there that supports it.
This is also why I am not convinced by reducing a work to the biography of the person who created it.
A fracture across a painted face may relate to a personal experience of the artist, but it may also speak about identity, division, the difficulty of maintaining unity, or even the violence involved in trying to impose it.
Biography may help us understand one part.
It does not necessarily contain the whole work.
Matter Is Not a Container
We also tend to think of material as though it were simply the vehicle for an idea.
But oil, acrylic, canvas, gold leaf or modelling paste do not merely transport concepts. Each material imposes a different kind of time, resistance and visibility.
Gold is a very clear example for me.
I am not only interested in what it may symbolise.
I am interested in what it does.
It reflects light rather than simply absorbing it. It changes depending on the position from which we observe it. A photograph can hardly reproduce what we see when we move in front of it.
So where does matter end and the symbol begin?
Perhaps they cannot be completely separated.
The same is true of fragmentation. A painted crack is not merely an emblem of psychological division. It physically breaks the continuity of a surface and forces the eye to alter its path.
The idea is not placed on top of matter.
It happens through it.
What Remains Alive
There is a symbol that has been with me for approximately four years.
I saw it during a meditation. It had the form of a kind of container, and with it came a very specific instruction:
“Learn to move this from here to there.”
I still do not know what it means.
Over time, I began to recognise that form in the outside world as well. Not because I was looking for it. I simply recognised it when it appeared.
This can be understood in a perfectly natural way: when something becomes relevant to us, our attention becomes more sensitive to recognising it. A form that might previously have gone unnoticed now stands out because it already exists in our memory.
But that does not resolve my question.
I can find associations, investigate similar images and try to explain what I saw, but I still do not have that sense of recognition I have experienced with other symbols.
The piece is still not in its place.
And I prefer to leave it that way.
I could choose an interpretation that seemed coherent and consider the matter resolved. But then I would not know whether I had understood something or simply found an explanation that suited what I wanted to believe.
For now, the symbol remains alive.
The Living Stone
I have been thinking about an expression for some time: the living stone.
Perhaps because some symbols behave this way within me.
Before acquiring meaning, a stone can simply be a stone. It is in front of us and asks nothing of us.
But something can happen.
An experience, an image, an emotion, a memory.
Matter enters into a relationship with our inner world and, for a time, ceases to be neutral to us. It contains something. Not necessarily because something objectively exists inside the stone, but because a relationship has been established.
The stone is alive.
Not literally.
It is alive because something between it and us remains unresolved.
And this brings me to another question that continually appears in my work: the relationship between the material and the immaterial.
We tend to imagine these two worlds as separate. Here is matter; there is consciousness. Here is the object; there is meaning.
But in experience I do not always find such a clear boundary.
An inner image can become a painting.
The painting becomes matter.
Years later, that matter may return to me a question I did not know how to formulate when I painted it.
Something intangible has altered matter, and that matter later alters my inner world again.
There is a circulation.
So where does one end and the other begin?
I do not know whether matter speaks to us. That statement would imply knowing something I do not know.
But perhaps we can allow matter to teach us.
To observe what happens when we stop treating it only as a passive container onto which we project our ideas.
A texture resists.
Gold returns the light.
A crack alters an image.
A stone acquires a history.
And we respond.
Is consciousness teaching matter to speak?
Or are we, for a moment, learning how to listen to it?
When the Stone Becomes Stone Again
There is something that distinguishes the symbol I still carry with me from others that have accompanied me in the past.
With some of them, there came a moment when I understood.
And then something even more curious happened.
I stopped needing to understand them.
The symbol did not disappear. Nor did I forget what it had meant. It simply lost that tension, that feeling of containing something that still needed to be discovered.
I had internalised it.
The piece was in its place.
And then, so to speak, the stone became stone again.
Perhaps this is one of the differences between intellectually knowing the meaning of a symbol and integrating it.
I can read a hundred times what an image represents and continue to feel that there is something in it I do not understand. But when it finally finds its place within my own experience, the question no longer needs an answer.
The symbol remains.
What disappears is the distance between it and what it had come to mean to me.
Interpreting Without Closing
This is why I find it difficult to think of interpretation as the search for a secret message hidden behind an image.
Interpretation can also mean observing the relationships the image produces.
Its history.
Its context.
The matter from which it is made.
What it awakens within us.
And also what we are not yet able to understand.
This does not mean that every interpretation is valid or that a symbol can mean anything at all. There is a difference between investigating an image and freely projecting onto it.
But neither do I think we should always rush to close its meaning.
Some symbols remain alive for years.
Others find their place.
And perhaps there are some whose meaning we will never understand.
I have at least one that is still waiting.
I do not search for it.
I do not try to force it to speak.
It remains there.
Perhaps one day the piece will find its place and what is still alive now will, finally, become stone again.
