In the upper reaches of Henry Orlik’s Time a figure descends from geometric rafters, arms outstretched, wild hair billowing, face masked in serene repose. Below, a complex mechanical object rests on a draped table, illuminated by an ethereal orb of light that cuts through the darkness without casting a conventional shadow. Painted in London circa 1985, following the artist’s return from five years in the United States, this canvas represents one of Orlik’s most concentrated meditations on humanity’s fraught relationship with the ineffable. The title’s geographical suffix suggests the American metropolis as the imaginative source, yet the subject was created and filtered through memory and reflection by Orlik at Redcliffe Square, London.

The composition immediately engages the metaphysical tradition. Giorgio de Chirico’s haunting piazzas, with their elongated shadows and disquieting stillness, find their progeny here; yet whereas de Chirico froze time in amber, Orlik sets it vibrating. The stark diagonal beams that bisect the upper canvas recall de Chirico’s The Enigma of the Hour (1911, private collection), in which the subject becomes a container for existential unease. Both painters employ light as a protagonist rather than a mere illuminator, but Orlik goes further: his radiant sphere exists without a visible source, casting no predictable shadow, embodying what the artist described as “a different reality” and “a portal” to dimensions beyond ordinary perception.

The central apparatus demands prolonged scrutiny. Neither a clock nor a scientific instrument, this prismatic construction sits on a green cloth that cascades in heavy folds reminiscent of ecclesiastical vestments. Orlik conceived this object as both a timepiece and a time machine, a device through which humanity attempts to contain and comprehend the uncontainable. Salvador Dalí’s iconic melting watches in The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York) present time as soft, malleable, subject to the distortions of dream and memory. Orlik’s clock, by contrast, appears crystalline, constructed, an elaborate cage fashioned to imprison something that cannot be imprisoned. Within its geometric lattice, organic forms seem to pulse and strain. The artist spoke of how “we manufacture time: we make a clock to contain time” so that “we are more important, because we’ve created it.” This is time as human vanity, the hubris of believing we can regulate cosmic forces through mechanical intervention.

The tablecloth beneath this contraption reveals one of the painting’s most profound symbolic layers. Its folds form crosses: not static, symmetrical crucifixes, but what Orlik called “living crosses” that writhe and shift like organic matter. The deep green fabric suggests both liturgical tradition and primordial vegetation, linking the sacred to the ancient. In discussing this element, the artist invoked the Tree of Life, an archetype appearing across cultures from Mesopotamian cylinder seals to medieval illuminated manuscripts, from the Kabbalistic sefirot to the Christian identification of Christ’s cross as the lignum vitae. The writhing, rooted quality of the drapery transforms a humble tablecloth into what Orlik described as “more ancient than man”: roots reaching downward into unfathomable depths while branches strain towards transcendence. Gustav Klimt’s Tree of Life, Stoclet Frieze (1905-1911, Stoclet Palace, Brussels), depicts this symbol through sinuous golden spirals; Orlik achieves something more unsettling, suggesting growth that is perpetual, restless, and never arriving at a final form.

The suspended figure presents the painting’s most provocative theological statement. With arms outstretched in a cruciform pose, descending from above with hair splayed like a corona, this being occupies the position traditionally reserved for divine manifestation. Orlik subverts expectation through the mask-like face and the pose’s distinctly theatrical quality. The artist explicitly linked this figure to “Bozo the clown” and the medieval tradition of the fool, referencing Quentin Massys’s An Allegory of Folly (c. 1510, private collection), in which a jester with donkey’s ears and a protruding “rock for a brain” holds a marotte, the fool’s sceptre topped with a miniature version of himself. In Massys’s painting, the fool places a finger to his lips: he knows his own folly, which renders him wiser than those who do not. Orlik’s descending figure occupies the same paradoxical territory: the sacred fool, the holy idiot, the one who speaks truth to power precisely because authority dismisses him.

The theological implications run deeper still. Orlik described this as a “pseudo-crucifixion,” a deliberate provocation in which the fool takes Christ’s place on the cross. “Christ didn’t need to be crucified,” the artist observed, “he had to be a fool to let it happen. Fool standing up against authority.” This reading transforms the painting from mere surrealist fancy into something approaching religious iconoclasm, a tradition with its own venerable history, from Byzantine iconoclasts to William Blake’s heterodox visions. Blake’s The Ancient of Days(1794, British Museum, London) similarly depicts a divine figure descending from above, arms outstretched, measuring creation with geometric instruments. Where Blake’s Urizen imposes rational order on chaos, Orlik’s fool descends into a world already over-ordered, already mechanized, already measuring itself into spiritual poverty.

The luminous orb on the left constitutes the painting’s spiritual centre. This light, which the artist described as having “no boundaries” and “no borders,” exists as “a different entity than the substantial, hard-surfaced, sharp-cornered, demarcated, manufactured timeclock.” Here is the fundamental opposition that animates the entire composition: manufactured time versus what lies beyond time, human measurement versus divine immeasurability. Orlik explicitly identified this light with inspiration, understanding, and divinity itself, noting that “God is light” while acknowledging that each viewer must determine what the light means for themselves. The orb’s soft radiance, achieved through the artist’s characteristic “excitations,” those thousands of minute spiralling brushstrokes derived from his reading of quantum physics, creates a luminosity that seems to emanate rather than reflect. Where the clock imprisons and contains, the light liberates and expands.

Orlik’s excitation technique achieves eloquence in this canvas. Every surface vibrates with molecular intensity, as if matter itself were in constant agitation. The artist borrowed the term from quantum physics, where an “excited state” describes particles that have been stimulated to higher energy levels. Applied to pigment, the concept transforms static representation into dynamic becoming. The technique recalls Pointillism’s optical mixing yet differs fundamentally in intent: whereas Seurat sought to systematize perception, Orlik sought to destabilize it, reminding viewers that apparent solidity disguises ceaseless motion. The green drapery shivers; the geometric clock pulses; even the darkness between forms seems to hum with potential energy.

The colour palette reinforces the painting’s thematic concerns. Muted greens and browns anchor the composition in earthly materiality, while sudden intrusions of warm ochre and rose suggest flesh, vulnerability, and the organic persistence of life within mechanical surroundings. The background shifts from deep umber to dusty rose, creating an atmosphere neither wholly interior nor exterior, neither day nor night. This chromatic ambiguity extends the temporal destabilization enacted by the subject matter itself. We cannot locate this scene in ordinary space-time; it exists in the perpetual present of contemplation.

In the upper right corner, an object that Orlik likened to an aeroplane, a whale, or a fish hovers near the descending figure. The artist linked this element to Christian symbolism, the fish as ichthys, the ancient cipher for Christ’s name, while noting its resemblance to his later (now, lost) composition Pravda, in which he “secularised” religious imagery. This polyvalent form resists singular interpretation, becoming whatever the viewer requires: aircraft suggesting modern transcendence, a marine creature suggesting baptismal depths, a cross in the sky suggesting divine intervention. “We’ve created the sky,” Orlik observed, meaning not the physical phenomenon but our idea of it, our attempt to conceptualize the inconceivable vastness above us.

The artist’s philosophical sophistication is evident throughout his commentary on this work. His observations on language, describing it as “very precise and complicated” and “telling a story beyond itself” through etymology and accumulated symbolism, echo Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigations into meaning. His remarks on the necessity of time for human comprehension, noting that “quantums all moving, all energy” require temporal deceleration before we can perceive them, anticipate contemporary discussions of consciousness and perception in cognitive science. Yet these intellectual frameworks never overwhelm the painting’s emotional immediacy. Time remains accessible precisely because its symbols operate on both intuitive and analytical levels.

The painting’s relationship to Orlik’s biography warrants consideration. Born in Germany to a Polish father and a Belarusian mother, both survivors of wartime trauma, Orlik spent his early years in British resettlement camps before attending a Catholic boarding school under the Marian Fathers. Religious imagery saturated his childhood, as did displacement, uncertainty, and the experience of existing between cultures and languages. The fool who descends in Time might be read as a self-portrait of sorts: the misunderstood artist as a holy innocent, speaking truths that established powers would rather not hear, suspended between heaven and earth without secure purchase in either realm.

The work ultimately resists conclusive interpretation, as all significant art must. Orlik offers symbols in abundance yet refuses to resolve their tensions. The manufactured clock and the borderless light coexist; the fool descends towards an altar that may be sacrificial or celebratory; the Tree of Life writhes in fabric that might be a shroud or a vestment. This irreducibility constitutes the painting’s power. “Does it matter if God is real according to our letters?” Orlik asked, gesturing towards the inadequacy of language, including visual language, to capture the ultimate truth. What matters is the search itself, the human need to find “that thing that makes them whole, gives meaning to their lives”.

Time is the synthesis of Orlik’s technical mastery, philosophical depth, and willingness to engage the largest questions without pretending to possess final answers. Painted in London after his American sojourn, it shows how that experience refined rather than transformed his vision. The monumental architecture of America gave way to something more intimate: a single room, a single table, a single illumination. Yet within this concentrated space, the entire human predicament finds expression. We measure time because we must; we worship fundamental light because we cannot help ourselves; and between measurement and worship, we perform our strange descending dance, masked and unmasked, foolish and wise, suspended forever in the eternal now of genuine encounter.