Jeremiah Chechik/Tinroof: Harmonizing Fact with Luminous Fiction

The “Selene” images are part of Chechik’s ongoing “Fictions” project, and therefore key to his
overall artistic strategy. The works’ nominal subject, the moon, long represented humankind’s
sense of cosmic wonder. Familiar in its nightly appearances, yet ever elusive in its changing
phases and positions, it was considered divine by virtually every premodern culture—an
embodiment of the ultimately unknowable forces that shape our destiny. Historically, the
celestial body’s gender was most frequently female, perhaps through a magical association with
the monthly menstrual cycle. Selene, the Greek deity, is only one of scores of such
personifications across the globe.

Yet in the West, the advent of monotheism brought a gradual change to popular perception.
Animism—the archaic belief that every natural phenomenon is endowed with a living
spirit—along with its offshoot, polytheism, were both gradually suppressed. Eventually
monotheism, in its turn, gave way the triumph of secular reason in the Enlightenment,
predicated on the absolute Cartesian division between mind and matter. By 1687, Newton was
able to account mechanically—through gravitational calculation, without recourse to daemons
or astral planes—for the lunar influence on Earth’s ocean tides. Within three centuries, science
then made possible the birth of space exploration, whose most dramatic early triumph was the
Apollo 13 moon landing.

What we gained in cognitive certainty we lost in emotional accessibility and power. The moon
on which Neal Armstrong first set foot on July 20, 1969, had long before suffered an ontological
demotion from goddess to lifeless rock. Chechik’s images, all created in a computer, certainly
convey the bleakness of the lunar surface and the ambient sense of isolation in a black void. But

they also do something more, something contrary. Steeped in an atmosphere of mystery, they
convey a yearning for re-enchantment, suggesting that the very impersonality of the universe
can give rise to its own metaphysical awe, vaster and deeper than any once induced by
Olympus.

At the other end of the size spectrum from the cosmic is the microscopic, although, as this suite
of pictures implies, there are eerie correspondences between the two. The circling of electrons
around the atomic nucleus recalls the orbiting of planets around a sun. The forces at play on
both the astrophysical and the subatomic levels produce effects not found in daily human
experience. The term “micrographica” suggests some kind of very small writing or depiction
with a disproportionately large import. Thus these nipple-like visual constructs also evoke single
cells, endowed with yet another sort of nucleus and a language of their own. For what could
more to the artist’s point than the coding of DNA or the genetic engineering made possible by
CRISPR editing and various molecular intervention technologies? In Chechik’s pictorial domain,
which here evokes botanical and science-lab imagery from the very dawn of photography, the
sun-nucleus often resembles a fruit or plant from his “Still Life” series.

That analogy is not inadvertent. Chechik is deeply attached to Schopenhauer’s assertion “the
world is my idea,” a notion derived from Kant’s claim that we can never encounter—much less
know—reality itself, but only reality as it impinges on our minds through the senses and, even
more crucially, through certain innate conceptual modalities such as “space” and “time.”
Mediating those mediations are the cultural filters of our era. Thus in classical times, still lifes
evoked the abundant joys of the Good Life, well lived and thoroughly examined on earth. In the
age of faith, the table might have obliquely recalled an altar; the vase or bowl, a chalice; the
fruits and flowers, the sacred host. Salvation was thus—invisibly—in the picture, an
omnipresent implication and promise. When the art form reached its apogee in 17 th -century

Holland, that great colonial and mercantile power was about to wane, adding poignancy to the
exquisitely quiet scenes. Cézanne and the Cubists gave the old format new life as the West
became modern, forsaking illusionistic naturalism for self-evident artifice, and trading religious
communalism for existential individualism.

And so it goes. . . . Such insights make Chechik’s sur-traditionalism a high-tech, high-concept
form or experimentation that can embrace both AI image generation and expert material
craftsmanship, while still addressing longstanding—indeed eternal—human concerns.