A work of art does not always begin when the brush touches the canvas or when the first sentence appears on a page. By then, something may have been trying to take form for a long time.
Sometimes it begins with a clear image. At other times, with an emotion, a question or a sensation that is difficult to name. There is a desire to draw something out of ourselves so that we can contemplate it from the outside. In such cases, creation functions as a mirror: it does not merely express what we already know, but allows us to discover what we do not yet understand.
THE NOVEL THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN PAINTED
I began writing the plot of a novel in 2020. In 2021, when I had written approximately eighty pages, I went through a personal transition that forced me to stop. The story remained suspended, but during that time I continued to paint.
There was also a recurring dream. It returned again and again, until I grew tired of repeating it. Over time, I began to think that the story and the dream might be connected in some way. I decided to finish the novel in the hope of also bringing to a close whatever the dream continued to represent.
Years later, I returned to the manuscript. I did not yet know what I would do with it—and I still have no definite plans or know whether I will ever decide to publish it—but I needed to discover where the story led and give it a conclusion.
Only after completing it did I understand that, during the years in which I had stopped writing, the novel had not remained entirely still.
I looked at the paintings that filled my home and realised that all of them were present in the story in some way. They were not deliberate illustrations of particular scenes. They were atmospheres, symbols, characters and questions that had first found a visual form.
While I believed that I had interrupted the novel, part of it seemed to have continued developing through painting.
THE DIFFERENT FORMS OF AKHMERMET
Akhmermet first appeared during meditation. The name arrived together with an intuitive explanation of its meaning, although at the time I knew of no historical or linguistic reference that could be connected to it.
Only afterwards did I decide to investigate the sounds and fragments that composed it. I found symbolic associations that, surprisingly, corresponded with the explanation I had received: light or transfigured spirit, the channel that allows its passage, and the mortal matter in which it finally takes form.
I do not present Akhmermet as a word from an ancient language or as a historically established translation. It is a personal construction. Yet the coincidence between the initial vision and the correspondences I later found strengthened its meaning for me.
From that point onwards, Akhmermet began to move through different media. First, it became a small painting. It then entered my writing and appeared in the novel as a place within the subconscious: an interior space that cannot be reached through physical coordinates.
Later, I adopted Akhmermet as my name on social media and, finally, as the name of this website.
The sequence matters. I did not choose a word and then build an identity around it. The same image gradually found different forms: vision, name, painting, narrative territory, pseudonym and digital space. Each one revealed a function that I had not foreseen at the beginning.
The website provisionally completes that journey. Akhmermet is now the channel through which something arising in one mind can acquire form and reach another. Painting and writing make that connection possible: an inner experience becomes matter, image or language and is made available for someone else to produce a meaning of their own.
THE FRAGMENT RECEIVED BY ANOTHER MIND
The person who encounters a work cannot access the entire inner experience from which it arose. They receive a fragment: an image, a sentence, a material form.
That fragment comes into contact with their memories, associations and personal structures, where it begins to produce a different meaning. Something that belonged to one mind becomes part of the inner world of another. It no longer remains entirely attached to its creator, but neither is it received neutrally. It is transformed through the encounter.
This circulation connects directly with the question posed by Homo Plumbi — Fragmentation I: how much of what we call the self truly belongs to us, and how much has been inherited, learned or absorbed from others?
Perhaps our identity is also constructed in this way: through fragments that we receive, interpret and reorganise until, at times, we forget that they once came from somewhere else.
Akhmermet consciously participates in that process. Each painting and each text offers a small fragment; the person who encounters it decides what place it will occupy within their own inner architecture.
LISTENING TO WHAT DOES NOT YET HAVE WORDS
I am interested in listening to what emerges from my subconscious. It rarely presents itself through orderly explanations, but through images and symbols.
Some are familiar to me. Others remain opaque, even to my own understanding. I do not try to force them to provide an immediate answer.
When a symbol persists, I work with it. It may become a painting, a scene, a word or a narrative space. To materialise it does not mean decoding a hidden and definitive message. It means establishing a relationship with the image: observing it, transforming it and allowing it to acquire new meanings.
Sometimes the symbol disappears after finding a form. At other times, it continues to return, as though a single work could not exhaust everything it contains.
From this perspective, creation is not simply the communication of a previously organised idea. It is also a way of thinking through matter. The hand may advance towards a place that reason does not yet know how to describe.
WHEN MATTER RESPONDS
Some works are planned. Others appear without a previous structure. In those moments, the gesture seems to establish a direct bridge between inner experience and matter, before logic organises, corrects or explains what is happening.
This is not an absence of thought, but a form of thought that has not yet acquired words.
Matter, however, does not obey passively. The imagined work almost never corresponds exactly with the work that becomes possible. Colour behaves differently, a proportion changes, texture introduces resistance or technique imposes its own limits.
That distance can frustrate us, but it can also allow something unforeseen to appear. The work begins to return questions. It ceases to be the simple execution of a mental image and becomes a dialogue between intention, matter and accident.
Trusting the process does not mean abandoning judgement. It means accepting that creation may lead us towards a solution different from the one we had imagined, and that this difference is not necessarily a failure.
ERROR AND WILL
Creation also involves making mistakes. Sometimes a decision disappoints us, or we feel that we have destroyed what was beginning to emerge. The impulse then arises to abandon the work, cover everything or begin again.
But an error is not always an ending. It may become a layer, a deviation or the beginning of another solution. Even what we eventually conceal remains within the material history of the work.
Will does not prevail because it succeeds in imposing the initial idea intact. It prevails because the artist remains before the work and continues searching.
To finish, therefore, is not to achieve a perfect image. It is to recognise the moment in which the work has found a coherence of its own, even while retaining the traces of its contradictions and of all the decisions that made it possible.
THE WORK HELD AT NINETY-NINE PER CENT
The works that leave the studio to be exhibited or enter a collection are finished. They have reached the full conclusion that I am able to offer them at that moment. If I publicly show a piece that is still being developed, such as Fragmentation II, I identify it explicitly as a work in progress.
Something different happens with the paintings that remain in my home. Many of them stay deliberately at ninety-nine per cent.
I cannot always explain what is missing, nor am I certain that I want to find it. It may be a final gesture, an almost imperceptible change or simply the possibility of returning to them.
It may seem contradictory that I dislike leaving things unfinished while also keeping certain paintings in this state. But there is a difference between abandoning a work and deliberately keeping it open.
The novel had been interrupted by circumstance. Returning to it meant recovering a process that remained unresolved. The paintings in my home, by contrast, have not been abandoned: they intentionally preserve the possibility of my return.
An unfinished project demands resolution. An open work keeps a relationship alive.
THE GREAT WORK CONTINUES
Perhaps I leave some paintings at ninety-nine per cent because we, too, are not completed forms. We repeat and transform ourselves at different scales: through our gestures, images, relationships and histories.
In this metaphorical sense, we are fractals. Each creation contains something of the larger process to which it belongs, even if we can only recognise it when we contemplate the whole.
Alchemy called the process of transforming matter—and, symbolically, the person working upon it—the Magnum Opus, or Great Work. From this perspective, each painting may reach its own conclusion, but the Great Work continues.
The person who created it will keep changing, and with that change, the way they look at what they made will change as well.
A work that remains in my home at ninety-nine per cent preserves that open connection. It is neither abandoned nor necessarily incomplete. It remains available to a future version of myself.
The creative process does not always move in a straight line. The same idea may recur at different scales and pass through different media before revealing its structure. A painting may become part of a future novel; a word may become a place; a story may retrospectively reveal the link between works that once appeared independent.
A work begins when something within us demands to take form. It ends when the artist decides to let it go. But the Great Work—the transformation of which every painting, text and symbol is only a fragment—is still unfolding.
