Threshold(Oro Antico)
Threshold(Oro Antico) · 2026 · Mixed Media on Paper · 7 x 5 in.
A hand-cut, bilaterally symmetrical totem form layered over a richly painted ochre ground; part of the intimate studio series Before Words, in which ancient pigment surfaces meet glyph-like forms that converge the biological and the sacred.
- Medium
- Mixed Media on Paper
- Substrate
- Paper
- Dimensions
- 7 x 5 in.
- Edition
- Unique
- Status
- Available
- Inventory
- AX-2026-002
- Scale
Drawn to scale from the recorded dimensions, against a sofa. Not a photograph of an installation.
From the series Before Words
Three decisions built this work. First: a ground of yellow ochre, one of the most ancient pigments still in use, found in the cave paintings at Lascaux alongside the siennas, carried forward through forty thousand years of human mark-making. Ancient Egyptians used it as the color of gold and eternity, the hue of the sun at its most enduring. The ground here is that old.
Second: a rectangle of cyan painted over the ochre. In pre-Columbian Mesoamerican traditions, turquoise was the most sacred color, associated simultaneously with fire and water, with the threshold between the living world and what lies beyond it. It was the color of the divine.
Third: a black cut totem form, bilateral and symmetrical, adhered by hand over the field. Face-like. Watching. In many ancient traditions, the frog is the threshold creature, the being that breathes water then breathes air, that transforms completely within a single lifetime, that calls rain from the sky and lives in two worlds simultaneously.
Oro Antico is Italian for ancient gold. The ground was always there. The form arrived at it the way the oldest symbols always arrive: not invented, but recognized.