Romanian artist Paul Virlan achieves a fictional dialogue with Kubrik’s film, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, and he creates a new world which includes modern human history and religion. The project was designed as an illustrated book and it is debated in three chapters: “Origins”, “Formations” and “Destinations”.
Paul’s Space Odyssey is a wonderful collection of graphic frames which has the role of representing the life in the most important phases. Everything derives from the human emotions, surprises humanity with all the anxiety, obsessions and demarches of an ancestral linearity, the dualism between life and death from the primates to the Homo Sapiens.
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ORIGINS
The ORIGINS chapter offers an interpretation for the beginning of the world. A creating hand, self-confident and laborious, opens the gate to life, which I represent in a chaotic manner.
The Creator
Big Bang
Geometry is the science which restores the situation that existed before the creation of the world and tries to fill the “gap”, relinquishing the help of matter.” (Lucian Blaga)
Domination
n the hundred thousand years that followed… the ape men did not invent anything. But they began to transform, they discovered abilities that no other animal possessed. They went to sleep in the evening on a branch as chimpanzees and woke up in the morning, on the grass, as men.
The kiss
THE KISS-We are apes. And primates. And mammals. And vertebrates. And eukaryotes. And we love each other.
The new born
Adoption
FORMATIONS
CHAPTER2 -This chapter opens with a scene describing evolution, as you said, violent evolution, because this describes man best: the desire for supremacy, hatred, but also the will to create.
Evolution
Sweet pioneer
Silent night
Saint George
Catching a star
Man! Detach yourself from reality and leap towards your will. It will defeat fear and it will become reality.
Faith
DESTINATIONS
CHAPTER3 - This chapter represents chaos leading to the end of humanity. The design is simplified, chaotic, dominated by line. Color tends to get colder, with a focus on violet, a clear symbol of drama and sadness.
The dreamer
Two faces
Three stages
The body will become earth brought by waters and the soul will turn into a star.
Back to roots
Take my dreams one by one. I repeat. Soak them in mud in the black pond.
The end
“It would be frightening to think that in all the cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one’s destiny lacks meaning”. (Mircea Eliade)