Meditation on “Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea, Which at Twenty Meters Becomes a Portrait of Abraham Lincoln”

I open my eyes to a courtyard of tan brick walls and a tan brick floor, and there are Spanish words being tossed around and to my surprise I catch a few of them – mostly names – “Gala” … “el Mar Mediterráneo” … “veinte metros” … “Abraham Lincoln?” There are three arches at the far end of the brickfield and the center one frames a face I recognize and it really is Honest Abe – a gaunt silhouette up from broad shoulders, straight unmistakable nose and hard cheekbone confirm this feeling but something is off and what’s Abe doing in Spain and this is over my head. I approach him and he begins to shift, his features flatten out, there are divisions all over and his face is made of pixels. Larger square versions of the yard bricks, ochre bricks, warm and cool, clouded fleshy greys and umber, shadowy blues and it’s a painting. A very large one at that, about six by eight feet with a strip of red around the edges and he’s calling to me in a deep, rumbling and perfect Spanish.

I am within twenty meters now and it is apparent that Abe’s face is really a hundred and twenty-ish cubic paintings in one frame, a hundred Rothko color fields talking politics and they are each in perspective. The blocks stack and build and turn and seem to move but don’t, and there is anticipation in their stillness. Even closer and the curves of a woman’s body replace Abe’s nose and she’s naked. She faces away from me and looks longingly out a window that is the shape of a stout cross and it’s filled with light and frames her dramatically. It becomes apparent that the window is the source of this dynamic tension in the blocks and the atmosphere and Abe’s head is full of dancing billowing flames and a white-yellow sun and a sliver of the sea; the water is absolutely calm and it is the stillest part of the painting and the center of the composition. Little dashes of sky blue pepper the fiery flowing sky all twisting and blowing in spirals, little moments of quiet, and there is a particular blue patch right next to the bursting sun and it, too frames something like a limb.

Closer still, close enough to where the woman is about life size but floating in the perspective of Abe’s shoulders which have become the ground. There is definitely a body in the sun and the crucifix is on my mind already from the window shape and it almost looks like Christ but not how I am used to seeing him. I look down at the top of his head as he does the same to Gala who is about twenty times his size and he’s obviously quite far away and looking through the depths of space and time. And all I know is that Abe is gone and there is a whole metaphysical scene taking place before my eyes.