Something primitive, very old, something akin to a movement, a first vibration of the planet, stirs and resonates in the work of Hans Lemmen. Something that invites humanity to climb down the ladder of time, to sense distant lineages woven into our dormant memory, braided into the mask of the beginning. A painting, drawings destined to allow our return, our regression: to attain the innocent destiny of life beyond time. To return to the place—to the place of time, to the place on the other side of time—where metaphors were not a miracle, but a method of knowledge, the wings of a decisive revelation. A territory in which being the other was not necessarily about shaping the mask, but about reviving the physical possibilities of trust in mystery and planetary changes. The metamorphoses, the infinite combinatorial, in the instant. In that territory, animal time flourished: and the bear skin was not a costume, but the skin of the man who dreamed in the heart of the forest with the gesture of a hand that makes magic. The time when the forest became horizon, and the horizon a machine for vision: then the transmission towers fulfilled the mission of the mills, and humanity howled in its body and in the skin of the wolf: Man devoured the wolf in order to be howled. A time without time. The other side of just enough time. An eternity that ends just beyond the horizon, in which nature itself becomes the screen of miracles and reflects—embodies —a dream of transmaterialisations. Sun of Vertumnus in which violence and joy are a matter of solidarity. The dog follows its shepherd, but the shepherd is still the pelt of the dog, the one who howls at the moon before naming the moon, before the shepherd, at that moment, is eaten by the wolf. Just when the song ends. There, in Lemmen’s painting and drawings, is the howling man who is the howling wolf: the one who still does not understand what the moon is because he himself is, precisely, the moon. Who still does not understand what the body is, because he is infinitely body. Who still does not understand what the mask is, because he is infinitely mask.

Lemmen is always better in riddles, always better in mysteries.

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The burier, the half deer Roger Caillois, founder of noon and its fateful miracles, inquired into the imaginary dimensions of stones, the metaphorical metamorphoses of rocks, the truth of the flawless disc that languishes like a funereal sun at the centre of an aseptic firmament. Caillois points out that this stone floating on the same landscape from which it was individualised was taken to a terrible incandescence and forged in a monstrous anvil through the distant, inaccessible, adventurous journey of the history of the planet. Stone: wisdom that is made form. Islanders, sitting on a memory stone ( I am in the wind and rain, here, barefoot, / sitting on a memory stone , says Vitorino Nemésio). The rock is like a word, because it is there, in the desert, floating in its own gravity, telling itself. All the time. Stone sleeping in the dream of veins (Caillois). So too the rocks of Hans Lemmen, visionary rocks, ready to magnetise images, to make them return to themselves: what it means to turn them over the world. Huge stones, which question us. We imagine that they burn from within. We imagine that this burning is called time. Lava from the beginning, lava from the beings thrown into time, far from the images, condemned by them. Lava that comes from the single star, from the star it might have been. It is Lemmen’s geological wonder: stone that speaks. Lost images for man, distant cults, lost in the dying moments of the beginning. We just need to know how to listen to what the stone is saying, to understand that language of stone, that whispering of screams poured into the water basin, into the empty skull, the eye that contemplates, from afar, crushed by the horizon. Floating island: how many times have we not seen it, there, on the threshold of the limit, sprinkled with the light that arrives and wounds, with the multiplied sun, deposited at the apex of sea and sky, submerged in its continual swinging in time?

It is split apart by lightning: now it is humanity—the now—that contemplates, crushed by the horizon.