The Shard of Time

Each visit to ARINA’s painting “THE SHARD OF TIME” unpacks new and deeper concepts. Paradoxically ancient and novel ideas ARINA encoded, and through the piece, into me. On first experience of that piece, I saw five opposite five – the balancing fingers of the exquisitely rendered hands of the figure. Moving on, I felt the powerful tension between the hands. Next, I slowly recognized those hands as a classic symbolic depiction of the Ten Sefirot (the super-partners) constituting the primordial Tree of Life. I then re-perceived the red notched block suspended between the hands. Slowly, I realized that the block represents the thirty two paths of wisdom (supercharges) linking the super-partners into the Tree of Life. Those symbols led me to the visual love being made between the asymmetry of the head and hands of the figure, and the super-symmetry balances the great black and white field with the red one. That visual masterstroke of tension effectively contains the viewer resonant experience that spans all levels. While the combining of elements is pure ARINA, the conceptual ingredients she stirred are not. They are the notions of the 4,000 year old oral tradition – and 2,000 year old written – versions of the “Sefer Yetzirah; The Book of Creation.” Concepts precisely equalled by the contemporary cosmology and physics of Stephen Hawking and colleagues’ “M-Theory.” ARINA intuited and conjoined these timeless ideas into a single work, and expanded the very scope of art. (Review by Paul Drewfs, writer, scientist, sculptor)