Flowers of Memory

Water Reflection and Flowers 

“The world asks to be seen: before ever there were eyes to see the eye of the waters, the huge eye of still waters watched the flowers bloom.” 

—— Gaston Bachelard, The Right to Dream *1 

Within the silvery mirror, a waterscape of floating imaginary flowers emerges. A lake veiled in morning mist, or the stillness of a quiet pond, half-rises and half-dissolves in the softness of light. The series titled 100 Years Is Not Enough is not born of observed nature, but rises from pure imagination and pure memory—it corresponds to no actual place in the world. This is not nature as seen by the eye, but nature felt within the heart: a landscape that blooms only within memory. During the pandemic, Hod, who is based in New York, spent an extended period immersed in nature in Connecticut. The realization that came to him there—that one hundred years are not enough to receive the beauty of simply being alive—became the title of the series itself. 

The process of making unfolds through a movement between multiple layers. First, linen or canvas is painted in abstract gradations of color, and the first breath of the painting rises into being. Over this, Hod lays down a layer of chrome—a metal with the gloss of a mirror, capable of throwing the image back—and the surface is transformed, for a moment, into a silver mirror. Onto this surface he pours acids and ammonia, and at times he brings the flame of a blowtorch to it. These materials react chemically with the chrome, and at each instant a contingent transformation occurs. Parts of the chrome open as if breathing, and the colors that had been sleeping in the layer below appear once again. Finally, he applies another layer of oil paint. The three layers dissolve into one another and are bound together into a single image. The moment when green pigment once dripped accidentally onto the surface and produced an effect resembling vegetal forms echoing on water—from that moment, a technique was opened: to summon, through acidic materials, the murky surface of swamps and lakes, and to call forth the materiality of water and light as painting. As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard argued, water is the substance that touches our imagination most deeply. Flowing water, still water, water that reflects the light—water awakens the memories sleeping within those who gaze upon it. What is happening on Hod’s surfaces is precisely this materialization of water. When the silvery mirror takes on deep tonalities through the action of acid, the surface moves beyond the mere representation of landscape and becomes a place that invites the viewer inside. The viewer’s image gathers within the picture, and one meets oneself standing before the painting. 

The reference of 100 Years Is Not Enough is Monet’s Water Lilies. Yet Hod’s series is not a reenactment of Monet. The canonical image is once undone within memory, and through the gleam of silver chrome and the action of chemicals it returns as something else—as a pale, almost dreamlike image, like an old daguerreotype photograph. 

What the title of the series announces is the feeling that no span of time is sufficient to exhaust the beauty of being alive. The French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch described nostalgia not as a mere yearning for the past but as an a priori emotion arising from the very fact that we ourselves exist within irreversible time. At its root lies the voice that asks for what has been taken back—give me back what you took from me *2. But what has been taken can never be returned. It is for this reason that nostalgia takes on the character of a bittersweet sensation, an unhappy happiness, a pleasing sorrow, a painful sweetness—not moral remorse, but an aesthetic emotion. “One hundred years are not enough” is precisely the declaration of this emotion. The flower that continues to bloom, as a beauty already condemned to pass, holds within the very instant of its blooming the foreknowledge of what is to come. 

The deepest insight Jankélévitch arrived at in his late writing is the concept of false recognition. He describes it as the experience of returning to a place one has never been and seeing again what one has never seen—and this false recognition, he insists, is more truthful than recognition proper *3. More truthful than retracing an authentic memory is the inner tremor by which one feels nostalgia for an unvisited place and welcomes the unseen as something already familiar. It is this tremor that most deeply exposes our relation to time. Hod’s paintings stand precisely as a site for such false recognition. Before the canvas, the viewer feels nostalgia for a garden never seen, and recognizes as memory a lake never visited. Old memory is awakened within the new, and for an instant the boundary between now and once wavers. It is the truth of this experience that lifts Hod’s flowers out of merely decorative landscape and binds them to the inner terrain of each viewer. 

‘Flowers of Memory’: the title of this exhibition indicates that the flowers Hod paints are not flowers called forth from any particular place, but flowers that bloom within memory itself. They are not concrete flowers in the world, but the very blossoming of the event we call memory. Memory does not preserve a perfect image. It unravels, it shifts, it falls away. And yet—or perhaps precisely for that reason—it draws our hearts most deeply. Hod’s flowers can bloom only within this transience. We continue to search for what we have already found—but in the very moment of searching, we have already found it: into this paradox of Jankélévitch, the exhibition draws the viewer. 

*1 Gaston Bachelard, “The Water-lilies, or the Surprises of a Summer Dawn” (1952), in Le Droit de rêver (1970). 
*2 Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (1974). Japanese translation by Norio Nakazawa, Kaeranu toki to kyōshū (Kokubunsha, 1994).
*3 Ibid., p. 416. 

References
Gaston Bachelard, The Right to Dream, trans. J. A. Underwood (Dallas Institute Publications, 1988).
Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves (1942).
Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (1974).
Yukitada Shimamura, “V. Jankélévitch no nosutarujī-ron: ‘tojita nosutarujī’ to ‘hirakareta nosutarujī’ o chūshin to shite” (“V. Jankélévitch’s Theory of Nostalgia: Focusing on ‘Closed Nostalgia’ and ‘Open Nostalgia’”) (2014). 

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