One Thousand and One Nights

At first glance — a huge elephant, plodding across a golden field. But the longer you look, the clearer it becomes: it has not a single piece of flesh of its own. Its whole body is woven from the living — lions, tigers, foxes, wolves, deer and hares, a monkey, scaly bodies, waterfowl and birds of prey have intertwined into a single silhouette. The trunk has become an elongated beast ending in a muzzle; the pillar-legs rest upon birds. And into this dense mass are woven human faces in turbans — while at the very heart of the figure two youthful faces have bent toward each other. Thus the artist has told two things at once in a single image. The first — the collection of tales itself: each creature here is a separate story, a destiny, a voice, and all of them, intertwining their bodies, form a single body of narration — a thousand and one nights grown together into one living being. The second, deeper: before us is a parable of the unity of being. The world seems a scattered menagerie, where predator and prey, human and bird are divided — but in truth all that exists is one indivisible organism, pervaded by a single Presence. The elephant is the Universe itself, assembled from myriad lives; the multitude that from without looks like enmity and difference, from within proves to be the Whole. Above, this body is ruled by a winged peri in a crown with a feather. She is not part of the beast — she is above it, the mistress of the kingdom of stories, a spirit that holds the scattered in unity. The outstretched hand with a flowering branch is the gesture of one who leads and bestows. Around, beyond the silhouette, free hares scatter, and in the sky birds circle: life continues even beyond the assembled body. This work took six months. About the work The work belongs to a special genre of the Eastern miniature — the composite figure, where a large silhouette is assembled entirely from intertwined beasts, birds and human faces. Such compositions, known in the Persian and Mughal tradition and taken up by the masters of Maverannahr, always carried a double bottom: behind the decorative puzzle lay a philosophical allegory. Here it is turned toward the Sufi idea of the unity of being — wahdat al-wujud — according to which all the diversity of the world is a manifestation of one Reality. The reference to the One Thousand and One Nights links this metaphysics with the image of an endless weaving of stories, where each life is a separate tale within a single fabric. The fineness of the painting, whereby dozens of creatures can be read each on its own and all together, answers to the high mastery of the court school. Details Base: Natural handmade Bukhara silk paper (90% silk, 10% cotton) Technique: Tempera, watercolour, natural plant and mineral pigments, gold leaf (23 carat) Unique piece