In the city, a large conglomeration of colourful skyscrapers looms tall, imposing and magical, in the distance, like a fairytale castle. The workers (as colourful balls) roll into work, like a giant pinball game, along grey, geometric pathways. A white plume of smoke rises out of the topmost tower, like the feather in a jaunty medieval cap. The castle-buildings appear like our first glimpse of the Emerald City at the end of the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz and like the opening scenes in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis where tall buildings rise in fabulous Art Deco, sci-fi futuristic combination. Glorious alternating rays of pink-red and yellow fan out in the sky like a delightful sunrise. The city is glossy, beautiful and energetic.

It seems that all is harmony in the Metropolis where everything rolls along rhythmically on its allotted path. The balls – the workers – are part of the giant game, the big picture, inherent to the balance of the city, as they roll into work, day in day out, and roll back again. On closer inspection, however, we notice that there are pitfalls: the balls can roll off course, or plummet down dark holes to who knows where? The balls are microcosmic, ‘billiard like particles … locked away in their own space and time’ which can ‘bounce off and clash with one another’ (Orlik, ‘To Make Visible the Invisible’). The paths no longer appear smooth but rutted with unpredictable indentations. The city works to its own rhythm: do we see the harmony, or do we see the ruts, the pitfalls and the smoke?

The tag line in Metropolis is ‘The mediator between the head and the hands is the heart’. For the city, this means that owner and worker (employer and employee) must have a mutual understanding and trust. The rhythm of the city relies on them and in turn, they rely on the city. It is a macrocosm of microcosmic interconnections. For the artist this suggests that the head has the inspiration for the work of art and the hands enact this inspiration. For art to be truly great, the heart must mediate to give something beyond what the visionary artist William Blake called ‘single vision’. It must offer truth and, for Orlik, this is looking beyond the materialist culture to an invisible inner life. Orlik believes, ‘the basic evolutionary drive of the universe in living systems and in human consciousness is towards more and greater ordered coherence. But in a culture where misinformation is increasingly sophisticated, we need to engage our instinct, intuition, to separate true from false’. (Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994).

Orlik is aware of the vast cities we populate ‘where individual choice and action seem to make no difference to what goes on around us.’ (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994). However, Orlik steadfastly maintains: ‘There is no separateness in reality, everything flows into one another, everything is related, as is everything in my painting.’ ‘No part or aspect of reality should be ignored or thought of as irrelevant’. (Henry Orlik, ‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994). It is then that the true rhythm of life in all its complexity lives harmoniously, body and mind. Orlik likens this to music: ‘if we reduce a symphony to the notes and say there are so many vibrations in various notes, we lose the music of the thing, the reality. The same way we lose the reality of the universe if we merely describe in quantitative terms the particles, the universe is composed of.’ (Orlik, ‘To make visible the invisible.’)