Samantha Rebello
..>>The Mythical Hystory of Kyng Midas and Hys Gylden Inseckt

The fragments of a fictional history, in painting, illustration, artefacts, and writing, present the metaphorical world of Kyng Midas (the king who wanted to turn things into gold).

The myth of the CUT, an allegory of the birth of matter, unfolds the genesis of Midas (via morphology in language), and the Stew and the Slew (a ‘fairy story’ by the fictional Quintillius Quintillian), tells the ironic tale of the king whose original (irrational) love of gold, morphs into the pursuit of money then power, mining the secrets of matter, in order to reform existence (to overcome death), resulting in the de-formation, mutation and sacrifice of life. Midas' inability to see what is really at stake, can be seen to be based in a traumatised perception, which has led to a peculiar interpretation of the elements of the world, and arguably a misunderstanding of the relationship between form, substance (and essence).*

References to examples from the history of visual art, together with writing, reveal a different relationship to substance and form, a dialogical relationship, attentive to the life in the materials (they speak beyond the attempts to control them), responsive to the resonances and facets of a word, implications of the paint, the line, the making of the illusion, the consonances, dissonances, layers of interpretation. Shifting convention in pictures and language reveal morphing perspectives of history, world views consolidated via the creation of masks (new designs, costumes, buildings, objects), a new image of life, (suppression of the whole) which conceals an underlying substance, or shadow, potentially revealed in the art work through a sensitivity to the discrepancy between that which one aims to present, and that which is. (The problem of representation.)

Through attention to this tension between substance and form, the artist might hope to reveal the making of the illusion, to stumble upon that which lies beyond image, and even towards essence (being).

In contrast, our Midas cannot see past his own image, believing in it, and in the words he speaks, and his, what we might call, materially materialist conviction, leads to the manifestation of the world of the subject/object(ive), concept/realisation- whose origins lie in the language of metaphysics [Gadamer]- via techne. In the attempt to escape the limits of matter, through the creation of new forms (to achieve the gold of the metaphysical universe) he imbeds himself in it. He does not recognise that he is part of an intelligent whole, that opposites are part of a continuum, and that this cutting of the world in order to reform it, is bound to release new insects, new infects, in the creation of a new imago.