‘The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls …’

Songwriter: Paul Simon

‘The Sound of Silence’ lyrics 1:50 pm Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Too Lost LLC

In Henry Orlik's Subway, New York, metropolitan infrastructure is not just a backdrop, but a transformative apparatus that converts the everyday commuter experience into a transcendent revelation. This extraordinary acrylic masterwork shows Orlik's unique approach, blending Eastern mysticism and Western painterly tradition. Executed between 1981 and 1985 during Orlik's transformative residency in Manhattan, the canvas emerges as a radical synthesis, capable of inducing the very perceptual shifts it depicts.

The compositional structure unfolds as a spiralling vortex of chromatic energy, where Orlik's revolutionary ‘excitation’ brushstrokes generate what he termed ‘living lines’: manifestations of qi that pulse with the kinetic memory of their genesis. As the artist explained in his seminal 1985 treatise, ‘Each object has an individual shape and character of energy; by applying my method to it, I want to express its essence and life force.’ Vermillion swirling and taut ‘ribbons’ descend to cerulean abysses whilst aureate filaments trace incandescent trajectories across magenta domains, collectively evoking both the thunderous approach of subterranean trains and the sensory deluge experienced by underground passengers. These gestural passages serve as visible representations of quantum energy, which are the fundamental forces that exist simultaneously as both substance and movement, reflecting humanity's dual nature as both physical form and pure consciousness.

The tunnel's spiral architecture creates a disorienting vortex, whilst colourful swirls and megaphone-like eddying purple bands suggest noise. Inspirational thoughts deluge the artist’s mind and here, the concentric purple rings transform the subway passage into a vast acoustic amplifier, echoing Simon and Garfunkel's ‘The Sound of Silence’. Orlik imaginatively merges and responds to this lyrical imagery, positioning his brush as the ‘coloured crayon’ from ‘A Poem on the Underground Wall’ to inscribe prophetic visions upon metropolitan walls. The chromatic maelstrom captures the blur of clothing and advertisements glimpsed from moving carriages, suggesting countless human narratives; brief encounters momentarily intersecting in the eternal dance of urban existence.

Dominating the composition are twin apertures that puncture the pictorial plane like cosmic wounds, dimensional gateways that suggest passage between parallel realities. The principal Void occupies the lower register, its obsidian depths evoking what Orlik conceptualised as a Lewisian portal to alternate dimensions, referencing C.S. Lewis's ‘Wood Between the Worlds’ from The Magician's Nephew. A luminous white counterpart radiates linear energies outward, establishing dialectical tension between absorption and emanation, descent and ascension. These circular perforations function as dimensional portals made visible, theoretical gateways through which consciousness might traverse - not merely spatial coordinates but temporal ones, embodying Einstein's assertion that ‘the separation between past, present and future has the value of mere illusion.’

Spectral figures emerge from the gestural chaos like phantoms glimpsed through carriage windows, their forms dissolving into and reforming from the chromatic matrix. These ghostly silhouettes appear in tunnel "windows"; passengers witness them fleetingly, their transient encounters recalling Plato's cave dwellers, who perceive only illusionary shadows cast upon stone walls which they believe to be reality. Orlik transforms this classical philosophical metaphor into the contemporary urban vernacular: subway travellers become chained prisoners, their interactions with fellow commuters merely projections of the ultimate truth existing beyond mundane perception.

The architectural structure reveals itself as fundamentally labyrinthine, spiralling outward from central focal points in patterns reminiscent of both Hieronymus Bosch's Ascent of the Blessed and the sacred geometries found in medieval illuminated manuscripts. However, where Bosch's blessed souls ascend toward divine illumination through angelic intervention, Orlik's contemporary pilgrims navigate their transcendence within technology and velocity, suggesting that modern spiritual awakening may still occur amongst the acceleration of everyday experience. The composition's megaphone configuration amplifies silence itself, directing beyond the surface-level noise of the subway to a profound internal silence - the approach to the sublime - that may be reached at the ‘still point of the turning world’ (T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton, The Four Quartets).

Within this swirling matrix, a single unmarked white parallelogram appears, containing what Orlik describes as a "black tear", perhaps the canvas's most sophisticated element. This zone of apparent calm within the surrounding chaos suggests a rent in the fabric of spacetime itself, a visual interpretation of Einstein's assertion about the illusory nature of temporal separation. Here, Orlik presents the subway tunnel not merely as physical infrastructure but as a temporal gateway where conventional chronology collapses into simultaneity, where past, present, and future coexist in the exact moment.

Historically, this painting positions itself within a lineage extending from Jackson Pollock's investigations of unconscious gesture through Wassily Kandinsky's spiritual abstractions to Yves Klein's cosmic speculations while simultaneously anticipating contemporary discussions about virtual reality, parallel dimensions and the simulation hypothesis that increasingly characterises twenty-first-century awareness. Following his exhibitions at London's Acoris Gallery alongside Surrealist masterpieces by René Magritte and Salvador Dalí in 1972 and 1974, Orlik established himself as a unique synthesiser of Eastern metaphysics and Western painterly tradition.

The technical execution embodies Orlik's revolutionary approach to painting as a ‘synthesis of the concrete and the abstract’. As he described in 1985, ‘The brushstroke is action art, but it is also a controlled force, regurgitated, capable of expressing a state of mind with a multitude of variations.’ Each gestural mark functions as both material pigment and embodied thought: Orlik's energy, his qi, creates surfaces that fizz with this energy, the sensation of being. With characteristic precision, he noted that, ‘If tired one cannot imitate energy... or if angry one cannot make the lines tranquil. It has the sensitivity of a lie detector.’

Philosophically, the canvas explores the nature of space and time through distinctly Taoist perspectives, drawing upon concepts of the Great Void as an infinite source of creative potential. The obsidian apertures function as visual representations of this emptiness, which contains everything, the formless source from which all forms emerge and to which they inevitably return. Orlik's excitation brushstrokes thus become manifestations of vital energy that rhythmically flow from the Void to create the "myriad things" of existence before dissolving back into primordial unity.

For Orlik personally, born in 1947 to a Polish father who fought with Allied Forces and a Belarussian mother who survived Nazi labour camps, the subway's themes of perpetual transition carried profound autobiographical resonance. His family's journey from wartime displacement through Polish resettlement camps to the Cotswolds in 1948 created existential familiarity with liminal spaces, those threshold zones where identity remains fluid and destination uncertain. The tunnel becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience itself: a dark passage between worlds where the self transforms into movement. During his Manhattan years, Orlik experienced skyscrapers as living entities, transforming urban alienation into artistic ammunition.

The Subway, New York, ultimately functions as both a mirror and a portal: it reflects our contemporary condition of perpetual motion and technological mediation while simultaneously offering passage to alternate modes of being. Through the masterful deployment of colour, form, and philosophical reference, Orlik has created not merely a painting but a meditation machine, a visual technology capable of inducing the consciousness shifts it depicts. In confronting this masterpiece, viewers find themselves no longer passive observers but active participants in the quantum dance between observer and observed, between the tunnel's darkness and its promise of illumination, between the sound of silence and the silence of sound that defines modern urban existence. This canvas stands as a testament to an artistic vision decades ahead of its time, transforming the most mundane metropolitan experience into a doorway between worlds, offering audiences not merely aesthetic pleasure but genuine transcendence through the alchemical power of artistic metamorphosis.