Tracing the Ghost of Light

We spend our lives trying to leave a mark on the dark. We strike matches, we build fires, we trace lines in the air with whatever glow we can carry. It is a desperate, quiet labor. The night does not care for our shapes. It swallows the movement as soon as the hand stops, leaving only the memory of a gesture that never truly existed. To stand in the cold, waiting for the sky to fall or the earth to turn, is to acknowledge our own smallness. We are temporary. The light we hold is borrowed from the sun, and the darkness we inhabit is the only thing that remains constant. We draw circles, we weave patterns, hoping to prove we were here, even if the wind erases the path before we have finished walking it. What remains when the hand finally falls still?

Hugo Baptista has captured this fleeting stillness in his work titled Self. He has drawn a line between the observer and the void. Does the light reveal the man, or does it only deepen the surrounding dark?