The Sator Square

Photographers Unknown, (The Sator Square; A Collection)

The Sator Square is a word square containing a five-word Latin palindrome in a sequence of characters that reads the same backward as forward. It is a five by five square made up of five five-letter words, consisting of twenty-five letters in total. These twenty-five letters are all derived from eight Latin letters, consisting of five consonants (STRPN) and three vowels (AEO).In particular, thr Square is a square 2D palindrome, which is when a square text admits four symmetries: identity, two diagonal reflections, and 180 degree rotation. As can be seen, the text may be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, or right-to-left; and it may be rotated 180 degrees and still be read in all those ways.

The Sator Square is the earliest dateable 2D palindrome. It was found in the ruins of Pompeii, Italy, at Herculaneum, a city buried in the ash from the 79 AD Mount Vesuvius eruption. It consists of the five Latin words: Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, and Rotes. Other Sator Squares have also been found in excavations under the church os Saint Marie Maggiore in Rome; at Cirencester in Cotswolds, England; at Dura-Europos in Syria; at the Valvisciolo Abbey, Latina, Italy; and as a partial inscription on a rune stone at Närke, Sweden.

“It seemed to him that the Square, itself the accidental masonry of many years, the chance agglomeration of time and of disrupted strivings, was the center of the universe. It was for him, in his soul’s picture, the earth’s pivot, the granite core of changelessness, the eternal place where all things came and passed, and yet abode forever and would never change.”

–Thomas Wolfe, Lost Boy: A Novella

Looking at Mapplethorpe

Photographer Unknown, (Looking at Mapplethorpe), Photo Shoot, Model Unknown

In June 1989, just a few months after his passing from AIDS, a retrospective of over 150 of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works, titled “The Perfect Moment” was due to open at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, DC. In a misguided attempt to avoid controversy due to the sexually-explicit nature of some of the photographs, the director cancelled the exhibition.

In protest, Mapplethorpe supporters congregated outside the gallery on the evening of June 30, 1989, projecting giant images of his work onto the side of the building, creating a powerful and moving tribute, and demonstrating the strong impact that the artist’s work had made on popular culture.

“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.”

-Robert Mapplethorpe

Olivia Howard Dunbar: “The Not Yet Darkened World”

Artist Unknown, (The Not Yet Darkened World), Computer Graphics, Anime Film Gifs

“The pale stars were sliding into their places. The whispering of the leaves was almost hushed. All about them it was still and shadowy and sweet. It was that wonderful moment when, for lack of a visible horizon, the not yet darkened world seems infinitely greater—a moment when anything can happen, anything be believed in.”
― Olivia Howard Dunbar, The Shell of Sense

Michael Armitage

Oil Paintings by Michael Armitage

Born in 1984, Michael Armitage grew up in Narobi, Kenya, and earned a BA in Fine Arts at the Slade School in London, later graduating from the Royal Academy with a Postgraduate Degree in 2010. He divides his time between Kenya and London where his studio is located.

Armitage’s large-scale, complex oil paintings are executed on pieces of lubugo, a bark cloth traditionally made by the Baganda people of Uganda and used for burial shrouds or worn on ceremonial occasions. He originally discovered the cloth sold as placemats in a market in Nairobi. Its transmutation from sacred textile to tourist tchotchke made him think of how, as support for his paintings, its texture would both disrupt the field of paint as well as mark the work socio-politically and geographically.

Armitage’s work is concerned with the contemporary dynamics of life in Kenya, both from the individual and the collective experience of its people. He merges memories of Kenya with media depictions of East Africa, entangling the personal and the everyday in a web of social and political tensions. Through these compositions, Armitage considers how African bodies, political reportage, and the body politic circulate within systems of global capital, highlighting the fraught relationship between Africa and the West.

His paintings contain many references in its compositional elements, motifs and color combinations to the works of artists such as Titian, Velazquesz, and Francisco Goya. Equally important is the influence upon Armitage’s use of symbolism and palette by the East African modernists, such as Meek Gichugu of Kenya and Jak Katarikawe of Uganda. Images of animals, especially monkeys, play a special role in Armitage’s paintings, becoming symbols of human qualities.

Michael Armitage debuted his 2014 painting “Kampala Suburb” (last image in series above) as part of the group exhibition “Imitation of Life: Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century” at HOME in Manchester, England. The painting, depicting two men in embrace, references the structure of a hieroglyph from ancient Egypt and, in the background, a frieze, taken from an image of an execution in Somalia.

“Although this was not LGBTQ related, I wanted the risk of violence to the couple to be in the painting, as members of the LGBTQ community have been repeatedly harassed, attacked, mutilated, or killed for who they are. It was important to have a sense of the risk of this private and basic intimacy within the painting, as the hostility towards the LGBTQ community extends into their private space. The current situation [in Kenya] is that neighbors who suspect men or women of being gay will attack them or accuse them of committing homosexual acts that are punishable by up to 15 years in prison.” – Michael Armitage

Joseph Campbell: “One’s Infatuations”

Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Sixteen

“To become—in Jung’s terms—individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one’s various life roles. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one’s pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one’s infatuations. It is a common thing to be overly impressed by and attached to masks, either some mask of one’s own or the mana-masks of others. The work of individuation, however, demands that one should not be compulsively affected in this way. The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles.”

-Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Nude #1”, Nude #2, and “Nude #3”, Etchings, 1984

After traveling to Italy in the early 1930s, American artist Paul Cadmus became fascinated with Renaissance art, particularly the works of painters Luca Signorelli, known for his structure of the nude, and Andrea Mantegna, known for his strongly marked forms of design and the parallel hatching used to portray shadow. Cadmus adopted certain Renaissance drawing techniques, especially when rendering male nudes.

Cadmus placed nudes like these in tight boxes, focusing on how the tension of the body conveys physical and emotional struggle. The lines in the background imply a shifting momentum from left and right toward the center. Like Michelangelo, he rendered his nudes sculpturally, employing finely hatched lines to define their musculature and to create the effect of light reflecting on marble.