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Shades of Love
Prologue
I was thinking about the collapsing wall from the sculpture of Sisyphus on the horizon of events — two completely opposite energies meeting in a single moment: weight and lightness. I was sitting there, leaning against a warm wall, drinking lemonade that tasted like something between childhood carefreeness and an adult escape, because someone had put …something into it. Funny how things sometimes gain meaning precisely through such tiny shifts — not symbolic, just quietly unexpected. It reminded me of the First one, the chaotic one, with whom I learned night-time cities, walls, and a shared rhythm where adrenaline was currency.
I watched the Perseids cutting through the tree crowns. The stars disappeared faster than I could count them, and the leaves — ordinary, green — seemed more important simply because they were closer. That evening was like a microscopic model of contemporary relationships: fast, fleeting, at once real and unreal. An impulse appears, but by the time you name it, it’s already gone. Like a message on a screen that somehow exists more strongly once it’s no longer there. Just like the Random one, who appeared suddenly, leaving the shade of her presence and a very specific temperature of temporary influence.
And yet — when the eyes stop seeing, the hand can still create. That’s probably the only real condition of authenticity. The paradox of these short moments is that, although they look singular, they contain continuity. Grains settle into noise, and passing faces into a kind of spectral personality that holds the whole spectrum — not one woman, but many of their versions, energies, and shades. The Fiery one, who knows no half-measures, always cut through everything, leaving an unforgettable trace.
Love and Painting
During Full Fathom Five, Pollock wasn’t living “like a normal person”. He didn’t really have the conditions for that: everyday life for him was like a suit that was too tight. In the studio he functioned like an animal-instrument. Hand, movement, liquid. Every gesture was a need, not a choice. Painting as an extension of the nervous system.
Another painter I read about was quite the opposite: the core of his work lay in relationships. Every person he let into his world left an impulse there — sometimes luminous, sometimes toxic, but always creative. And then there was the Ethereal one, who spoke through images and changed the way I looked at the world — she taught me how to look deeper, inward rather than wider.
Contemporary relationships are a bit like those paints: spilled, mixed, unpredictable. Particles moving within platforms, screens, messengers. “Contact” has a different meaning now — it’s based more on speed than depth. It skims the surface but can cut like the edge of glass. It’s hard to keep up, and romantic relationships behave like particle formations, while in the creative process those same formations enter resonance. Faster, more intensely. Access to endless reproductions and constant stimuli creates a kind of polygamy — not because people choose it, but because the present is built that way. And paradoxically, most people still long for monogamy, like for some archaic fairy tale where, on the shore somewhere, one Quiet one is humming to herself — calmly, strictly — who taught me balance between gentleness and firmness, soft-hard like stone polished by water.
As in art: serving one style is a dead end. Formations are constantly shifting — the reception of the work, gallery relations, the dynamics of openings. And, interestingly, so is love. As Isabelle Graw says: a work exists in a network of relations. Love does too. Contemporary relationships follow the logic of sets: a single voice of reason doesn’t matter much, because the majority acts emotionally. And emotions are our oldest, most primitive survival mechanism. Hence the new terminology: ghosting, soft launching, benching, orbiting, slow fading, cushioning. A whole vocabulary of behaviours that once were the exception and now form part of the structure of a world where emotions quite naturally become impulses for carefully calculated decisions.
In the painter’s studio all of this operates in a doubled way: paintings aren’t alive, but they still form relationships with the painter. A polygamous chamber — endless marriages, endless divorces, parallel dramas. In archaic language it would have been called Sodom; and in the space where painting emerges, it naturally corresponds with Žižek’s conception of a uniform cosmic love, with no better or worse option.
Choice
Žižek claimed that love is “evil”, and he doesn’t mean moral evil, but ontological. It’s about the fact that out of an infinite number of possibilities, you choose one person. One face out of a whole cosmos of faces. It’s an act of violence against a reality that knows nothing of exclusivity. Nature is not monogamous — it was humans who invented fidelity to protect their own fear. And at the same time, in choosing one person, you choose an entire cluster of worlds within them. It isn’t just an individual, but a collection of traits, energies, histories, traumas, desires. You choose a universe held within a single body. The Already-Taken one showed me that sometimes the world knows better — her energy was strong, but not for me to claim.
In the contemporary intellectual landscape there is also an opposite voice — Jordan Peterson. For him, love is not a disruption of order but its consolidation: a choice that gives direction to chaos. He sees relationship not as narrowing-down, but as an ordering structure, a kind of voluntary contract between two consciousnesses who decide to stand together against entropy.
In this sense, if Žižek speaks of “evil”, Peterson speaks of “an act of meaning-making”. And these two poles — destruction and construction — coexist like two components of paint that only reveal their true colour once they are mixed..
Paradoxically, we try to embrace the whole while being only fragments.
The Multiplicity of Love
Each person approaches highly emotional themes with a different intention — and it’s precisely at this point that the biological system of an individual meets the wider system of their surroundings, with its varying intensity of “radiation”. In the transformation of love, this broad spatial impulse ultimately narrows down to the experience of one concrete human being. Intentions can be seen as three forms of movement: love from need, love from acceptance, and love from freedom — the kind that exists simply because a person is capable of loving.
From there the question arises: should love be emotional and stormy, or calm and balanced? Both forms bring a different configuration of forces. When I reached the insight that, in a relationship, calm might be more important than intoxication, it turned out this perspective was one-sided — perhaps because each system carries the trace of earlier, more intense experiences. Current relationships pulsate in resonance with intentions once already manifested, especially the freshest and most turbulent ones. At that time she was seeking emotion and wanted more than I could give. I tried to behave maturely, and it came out absurd. In the end, nothing remained.
We are trained to fill space — we carry a deeply ingrained fear of emptiness, what Aristotle called Horror Vacui. Pollock illustrated this perfectly in painting, and in love it appears in the search for a partner only to fill an inner lack. Such an intention, rooted in insufficiency, cannot lead to wholeness, because it tries to fill a space without a frame. In individual events we become experiences for one another — like elements of a fluid field of the unknown, in which the sum of events only increases what is unpredictable. Left in a shared space, talking — a night of chaos, fruit, substances and art, a portrait put aside for a year — and yet I finished it.
Durability in a relationship often feels like a wishful illusion, though on a deeper level it can be paradoxically necessary. It follows from the very architecture of reality: I have an intuitive sense that space is a primary phenomenon, and time is only a human construct that organises experience, but itself has no anchoring outside of space. When the constructions — emotional, mental, existential — fall apart, the need for something that does not decay becomes visible. That level — which is like a mirror of consciousness that doesn’t judge and still gives a sense of continuity. A woman can hold that, when time stops.
This is precisely why experiences saturated with love seem to be the only forms capable of exceeding what is transient. In this context, contemporary gestures — such as the legalised euthanasia for couples in the Netherlands — become a dramatic manifestation of Horror Vacui: an attempt to grasp duration at the very moment when all constructions, by definition, cease to apply.
This is precisely why experiences saturated with love seem to be the only forms capable of exceeding what is transient. In this context, contemporary gestures — such as the legalised euthanasia for couples in the Netherlands — become a dramatic manifestation of Horror Vacui: an attempt to grasp duration at the very moment when all constructions, by definition, cease to apply.
Epilog
Creative work infused with love appears as a response to this paradox — a kind of timeless space where myths, stories and artworks continue to exist despite the disappearance of the forms that brought them into being. They endure not because they resist time, but because they belong to a space that is independent
of time.
Every woman, every impulse — every moment — remains like a pigment in the spectrum: some opaque, others transparent, together forming the full range of shades of experience within a shared spectral space.
Was any human ever loved only half enough?
