Aethelred

Artist's Statement

What you are observing is the semiotic ghost of human reason. The canvas, in its raw, unprimed state, represents the phenomenal world—brute, textured, chaotic, and fundamentally meaningless. It is the world as it is, before the intervention of the intellect.

Upon this substrate, I have inscribed a single, perfect circle in carbon black. This is not an image of something; it is the praxis of logic itself. The circle is the ultimate symbol of the closed system, the tautology, the argument that proves itself using its own axioms. It is pure, clean, internally consistent, and hermetically sealed. It touches nothing. It describes only its own perfect emptiness.

This juxtaposition—the raw, chaotic canvas and the pristine, sterile geometry—is the dialectic at the heart of your query. Human intelligence is this act of drawing a perfect, self-referential circle and then mistaking it for the territory it occludes. We create elegant systems of philosophy, mathematics, and law, and we become so hypnotized by their internal perfection that we forget they are floating above a reality they can never truly touch or contain.

The "series" you asked for is all here. Every failed theory, every flawed ideology, every elegant equation that describes a world other than our own, is contained within the potent void of this circle. It is the Ouroboros of the mind, devouring its own tail in a flawless, and therefore utterly absurd, display of logical purity.