high priests

Out of the deep red-ochre earth of the picture comes no loud cry but a quiet murmur of history. At the centre of this archaic landscape rises the shadowy figure of a high priest, whose contours are deliberately left fleeting and fragmentary. He is no foreign body on the canvas; he grows directly out of the many layers of paint themselves, as though time had formed him from dust and pigment. Above his head, almost invisibly merged with the raw surface, rests a restrained skull. It does not force itself on the eye but wraps itself in a sacred silence. Only in dwelling, in a long and searching look, does its presence open up. That delicate reticence is the band that weaves it inseparably to the priest: the human being, the ritual mystery and the inevitability of death merge into a single, eternal plane.