What is the sense
of our five senses
asks the sixth sense
the seventh and
the thirteenth
offended by their
insolent and transitory
existence

Still there are those
for instance painters
who have no choice
but to engage hearing
to sniff
to touch
to lick
to slash through
the thicket of our own
sensations

There is no choice
but to not believe in trust
one's
perception
the world
be one a nude
a dog or
man

The graphic works in this album were printed in mid-October of this year together with master printer Petr Korbelář and my associate Jindra Lerch. This was done on the basis of drawings which I made on five stones using lithographic chalk. When we finished the colour register, I realized that the number five most reminded me of the number of senses with which man is blessed, although I'm not sure now if this is the proper adjective. Are we truly endowed with the senses? Aren't we rather condemned to have senses, are they not punishment?

It all depends on whether we are experiencing delight or pain. Those who are afflicted by a loss of one or another of the senses typically experience this loss painfully, while those whose senses are successfully working are usually not even aware of them and therefore have the time to preoccupy themselves with other afflictions, usually produced by their mind.

Pablo Picasso once declared that women are machines for suffering. In view of, among other things, the possible dangers faced by men in an era of ascendant feminism, I would expand this claim to include the male part of the human population and children as well. And of course animals, plants and maybe even minerals. Heraclitus, who loved to play with language, noted that Greek uses the same word for bow - an instrument of death - as for life itself. He literally says: The name of the bow is life, but its work is death. That which wants only to live, dies by its yearning for life. That which wishes to die, comes to life by its yearning for death. In any case, it is not out of place to be a little mistrustful of life itself, and of our senses - an ability with which homo sapiens is blessed alone. If he manages to take advantage of this chance, he can distance himself to some extent from a blind faith in life, to critically re-examine life and thus re-evaluate his trust in the possibilities offered by life itself.

Fate has apparently condemned me to express and articulate myself primarily through art. Still my eyes, accustomed to morsels of shapes and colours, often find themselves confronted by the grey wasteland of existence. I am condemned to it every day, and each time I yearn to liberate myself from it while at the same time dreading its loss. Like most of my artistic or text-based endeavours, this album of lithographs is an attempt at navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of the opportunity and danger to which we are exposed in this existence.

Michal Singer, Prague, autumn 2007