‘An eternal night, without a thought or a dream, awaited her.’

(Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid)

In the extraordinary corpus of Henry Orlik's New York period (1980-1985), few works encapsulate the artist's visionary synthesis of urban Surrealism and quantum mysticism as powerfully as Mermaid in Central Park. Executed in acrylic with Orlik's signature 'excitation' technique, the work presents a cosmic tableau where aquatic mythology converges with metropolitan reality through what the artist terms his 'quantum painting' methodology. The work emerges as both a sophisticated philosophical meditation on the interpenetration of visible and invisible realms and a profound commentary on the psychological landscape of urban alienation in Reagan-era America. As a vital visual expression of André Breton's Arcanum 17, it invites the audience to engage in a reflective exploration of Orlik's profound insights.

The painting's compositional structure reveals Orlik's mastery which can reveal different levels of reality which simultaneously break through to each other. The upper firmament presents a magnificent jellyfish-like celestial apparition rendered in incandescent coral and salmon hues, like a portal to another realm, its fiery emanations, like cosmic neural pathways. It manifests Breton’s description of the star, Sirius with "points of red and yellow fire." This strange, bold, astral (and yet organic) manifestation hovers above a terrestrial, crater-like depression, where the central figure, a naked woman with a raised knee, suggesting imminent emergence, occupies the precise psychological and spatial threshold between earthbound confinement and the transcendent possibility that defines the Arcanum 17 archetype – the Star Tarot card.

The surrounding landscape undulates in waves of opalescent brushwork, each mark bearing what Orlik described as "the sensitivity of a lie-detector", a direct transmission of his emotional and spiritual state during creation. These thousands of spiralling excitations create a hypnotic surface texture that transforms static paint into kinetic energy fields, where discrete particles ricochet through space and time. The technique visualises what physicist David Bohm theorised as the "implicate order": the hidden connectivity underlying apparent separateness, manifesting Orlik's core belief that "there is no separateness in reality, everything flows into one another, everything is related."

Mermaid in Central Park occupies a unique position within the broader narrative of American Surrealism, representing what might be termed 'quantum surrealism', an innovative and distinctly post-war evolution that incorporates scientific paradigms unknown to Breton's original circle. This innovative approach, which Orlik developed during his time in New York (1980-1985), represents a significant departure from traditional European Surrealism. However, the painting's most profound art historical dialogue occurs with André Breton's Arcanum 17 (1944), creating a visual meditation on themes Breton first articulated during his lonely American exile, which seem as relevant today as they did post-war.

The correspondence between Orlik's Mermaid in Central Park and Breton's Arcanum 17 proves remarkable in its precision. Breton's description of Sirius, 'the Dog Star,' with its 'points of red and yellow fire... and below the luminous blaze... a young woman is revealed, nude, kneeling by the side of a pond,' maps directly onto Orlik's compositional architecture. The incandescent coral entity hovering in the upper firmament embodies Breton's fiery celestial vision. At the same time, the mermaid positioned by her teal, crater pool manifests as the kneeling woman beside the water. This is not a mere coincidence but a conscious homage. Orlik, who exhibited alongside masterworks by Magritte and Dalí at London's Acoris Gallery, was intimately familiar with the surrealist canon, and his respect for it is evident in his painting.

The tarot dimension deepens this connection exponentially. Arcanum 17, "The Star," traditionally depicts a female figure pouring water under stellar guidance, often with one foot on land and one in water—the archetypal image of liminal consciousness bridging terrestrial and celestial realms. Orlik's mermaid embodies this threshold state with extraordinary fidelity, her hybrid nature reflecting the card's promise of spiritual renewal through the integration of opposites. The painting thus functions as both a visual tarot meditation and a cultural translation, updating Breton's wartime vision of regeneration through the feminine principle for the atomic age.

Where Breton wrote Arcanum 17 during the apocalyptic nadir of World War II, seeking hope through mythological renewal, Orlik paints during the psychological stalemate of the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation remained perpetually imminent. Both artists turn to the Mermaid/Melusine archetype, the water spirit capable of traversing multiple worlds, as a symbol of consciousness that transcends historical catastrophe through access to eternal patterns. The Mermaid/Melusina represents the banishment of care for the earth; she has been dispossessed but her symbol as the sacred soul offers the potential for salvation through transformation and psychological or spiritual growth. Orlik reimagines her in a dream-Central Park, she is inside but outside the city. His quantum framework updates Breton’s vision for an era when physics reveals reality's fundamentally probabilistic nature, making the painting particularly relevant to the Cold War era. This emphasis on the painting's relevance to its historical context indicates the timeliness and significance of Orlik's work.

The alchemical potential of Arcanum 17 was vividly espoused by Breton who saw its allegorical meaning as ‘love summoned to rebirth … rising to its full consciousness, to its complete dignity; liberty vowing to really know itself well and to become dynamic since its own loss is at stake.’ In his affirmative writing, he connected it to ‘the certainty of renewal’ which can only be known by ‘poetry, liberty, and love.’ In accord with this, Orlik’s imaginative re-exploration epitomises the alchemist, Paracelsus’s (1493-1541) words: ‘Besides the stars that are established, there is yet another - imagination – that begets a new star and a new heaven.’

The work resonates powerfully with Yves Tanguy's biomorphic landscapes and Salvador Dalí's crystalline precision yet transcends these precedents through its innovative integration of process-based methodology and unexpected incorporation of vernacular visual languages. Orlik's formative exposure to 1950s and 1960s comic book aesthetics, particularly Marvel's Sub-Mariner series and DC's Aquaman, provided crucial iconographic precedents for his treatment of aquatic mythology and liminal consciousness. The underwater kingdoms depicted in these publications, with their crystalline architectures and bioluminescent inhabitants, established a visual vocabulary that Orlik would later sophisticate through surrealist and quantum theoretical frameworks. The novelty of this unique integration of comic book aesthetics and high art techniques is a testament to Orlik's innovative approach and artistic prowess.

More significantly, the kinetic energy patterns ubiquitous in comic book illustration, those radiating "motion lines" and cosmic force visualisations pioneered in EC Comics' Weird Science-Fantasy anthology, anticipate Orlik's excitation brushstroke methodology. Where Tanguy's Indefinite Divisibility (1942) presents static forms suspended in psychological space, Orlik’s technique synthesises Tanguy’s biomorphic sensibility with the dynamic visual grammar of sequential art. The resulting hybrid aesthetic channels what might be termed "pop surrealism", high art mysticism filtered through mass media mythology.

The comparison with Jackson Pollock's action painting proves equally illuminating. Both artists prioritise gestural authenticity and energetic expression, yet Orlik's approach remains fundamentally representational, channelling pure energy into recognisable iconography derived from both classical mythology and contemporary popular culture. This synthesis positions Orlik as a crucial transitional figure, bridging the gap between Abstract Expressionism's pure abstraction and Pop Art's embrace of commercial visual languages while maintaining Surrealism's commitment to consciousness transformation.

The central mermaid figure functions as an alchemical symbol of profound sophistication, embodying what Breton termed the "Arcanum 17 principle", the capacity for consciousness to transcend historical catastrophe through access to eternal regenerative patterns. In classical alchemical tradition, the mermaid represents the successful integration of opposing forces: terrestrial and aquatic, conscious and unconscious, temporal and eternal. Orlik's interpretation amplifies these associations through both his quantum framework and his direct engagement with Breton's tarot symbolism.

The Arcanum 17, or "Star" card, traditionally depicts hope emerging from darkness, spiritual guidance manifesting through feminine wisdom, and the promise of renewal following destruction. Orlik's compositional structure follows this archetypal pattern with extraordinary precision: the luminous celestial entity functions as the guiding star.

At the same time, the mermaid below embodies the traditional card's figure of the woman who pours healing waters. The crater setting reinforces this reading, representing both the abyss from which hope emerges and the sacred pool where transformation occurs. She sings ‘a hymn to life’. (Anna Balakian)

Orlik's presentation of the mermaid as Bretonian Melusine extends beyond visual correspondence into philosophical territory. Where Breton saw the Melusine as embodying what he called "convulsive beauty", beauty that emerges through the collision of rational and irrational forces, Orlik's quantum approach suggests that such collisions occur continuously at the subatomic level, the excitation brushstrokes surrounding the mermaid thus represent not merely artistic technique but cosmological principle: the fundamental turbulence from which all stable forms emerge.

The creature's positioning within the crater-like depression reveals itself upon meticulous examination as an unmistakably uterine environment —a cosmic womb where consciousness gestates before emerging into manifest reality. The organic, protective, curved walls create a sacred vessel around waters whose jade-green colouration connect to alchemical traditions of aqua vitae, the primordial life substance from which all existence springs. The mermaid's quasi-foetal positioning, with knees drawn protectively toward her torso, reinforces this reading with startling anatomical precision: she occupies the eternal moment just before cosmic birth, the threshold between potential and actuality that defines both individual consciousness and universal creation.

The emerald colouration of the gestational waters proves crucial to interpretation. Beyond prominent associations with fertility and natural growth, this specific hue represents what medieval alchemists termed the "first matter", the undifferentiated substance containing all possibilities in latent form. The mermaid thus exists within the fundamental creative matrix, perpetually poised for emergence while maintaining a connection to the source of all becoming. Her raised knee gesture, captured in Orlik's characteristic moment of perpetual becoming, now reads as the cosmic birth process itself, the eternal labour through which consciousness delivers itself into manifestation. At the same time, the excitation brushstrokes surrounding this sacred space represent the vital electromagnetic energies animating universal reproduction.

For an artist whose life was defined by displacement and cultural exile, this imagery of cosmic birth carries profound autobiographical resonance that transcends mere personal narrative. The womb-crater represents simultaneously the lost homeland and the promise of perpetual renewal, consciousness eternally capable of rebirth regardless of historical circumstance through the “displaced person's gift of prophecy." As someone born into post-war upheaval, whose childhood trajectory through Polish resettlement camps created an acute sensitivity to civilisational collision, Orlik possessed an exceptional capacity for perceiving patterns invisible to those embedded within cultural assumptions. The mermaid embodies not just the bridge between worlds but the eternal child of the cosmos, forever emerging from the source while remaining intimately connected to it through the sacred clown's methodology of revealing cosmic truths through seemingly impossible conjunctions.

Orlik's philosophy, deeply influenced by his paternal Polish Catholic and maternal Eastern Orthodox heritage and subsequent exploration of Eastern mysticism, manifests throughout the painting's symbolic architecture. The celestial jellyfish entity can be interpreted as a contemporary angel, a messenger from transcendent realms rendered in the visual language of marine biology rather than traditional iconography. Its luminous presence recalls the Shekinah of Jewish mysticism or the Dharmadhatu of Mahayana Buddhism, the fundamental luminosity underlying phenomenal existence.

The teal colour here associated with the mermaid evokes the Virgin Mary's traditional blue, yet her texture introduces an element of the Chthonic feminine, connecting to pre-Christian goddess traditions. Similarly, her bearing evokes classical, pagan sculptures. This synthesis reflects Orlik's broader theological project: the reconciliation of Western religious symbolism with Eastern concepts of cosmic consciousness. The painting thus functions as a visual theology, proposing new mythologies adequate to atomic-age spirituality.

Mermaid in Central Park emerges from Orlik's profound engagement with New York's psychological landscape during the early 1980s, a period marked by urban decay, social fragmentation, economic restructuring, and the pervasive influence of mass media on collective consciousness. The painting can be read as a sophisticated response to what sociologist Georg Simmel identified as the "blasé attitude" characteristic of metropolitan consciousness, the psychological numbing that results from sensory overload and social anonymity, yet updated for an era when comic books, television, and emerging video culture had fundamentally altered the relationship between individual imagination and collective mythology.

Orlik's insertion of mythological content into the contemporary urban environment represents what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss termed "mythical thought", the human capacity to construct meaning through the symbolic transformation of lived experience. However, the visual vocabulary employed draws explicitly from the democratised mythology of comic book culture, where aquatic superheroes like Sub-Mariner and Aquaman had already established precedents for beings capable of traversing multiple worlds. The mermaid thus becomes a compensatory figure operating within a specifically American mythological framework, restoring enchantment to a disenchanted world through the synthesis of high art technique with popular culture iconography.

This approach reflects broader cultural developments of the 1980s when the boundaries between elite and popular culture were undergoing radical redefinition. Orlik's sophisticated integration of comic book aesthetics anticipates the emergence of graphic novels as legitimate literary forms and the eventual canonisation of superhero narratives within academic discourse. The Central Park setting proves crucial here: Olmsted and Vaux's original design intended the park as a democratic space where urban dwellers could reconnect with natural rhythms. Orlik's mermaid extends this project into the realm of contemporary fantasy, suggesting that psychological restoration requires not merely contact with nature but engagement with the numinous as it manifests through the full spectrum of cultural production, from ancient myth to modern sequential art.

From an in-depth psychological perspective, the mermaid serves as an archetypal representation of what Carl Jung termed the anima, the feminine principle within the male psyche that mediates between the conscious ego and the unconscious depths. Orlik's mythology, shaped by displacement, exile, and artistic vocation, finds expression through this figure of perpetual liminality.

The mermaid's hybrid nature mirrors the artist's status as a cultural hybrid, born in Germany, raised in England, painting in America, forever suspended between fixed identities.

The crater setting suggests a process of psychological excavation, what Jung called "active imagination", whereby unconscious contents are given visual form through artistic practice. The surrounding excitation field represents the activated unconscious, the realm of potential from which creative insights emerge. The painting thus documents not merely an external vision but an internal process of individuation, the lifelong work of integrating conscious and unconscious elements into a unified personality.

Orlik's chromatic choices reflect his sophisticated synthesis of multiple visual traditions, from academic colour theory to the mechanical printing aesthetics of 1950s comic book production. The coral-to-salmon progression of the celestial entity evokes the dawn light while simultaneously referencing the saturated colour palettes achievable through Ben-Day dot printing processes, which defined comic book visual culture during Orlik's formative years. Alongside the distinctive Klimt-like jewel colours of teal, amber and gold a complementary relationship is created, establishing a visual harmony that bridges high art colour theory with the vernacular chromatics of popular illustration.

This integration proves far from superficial but rather represents sophisticated cultural archaeology. Orlik's excitation technique, with its thousands of discrete brushstrokes, functions as a handmade analogue to comic book dot-matrix printing. However, each mark carries the gestural authenticity absent from mechanical reproduction. The resulting surface achieves what might be termed "quantum pointillism", a methodology that acknowledges mass media's influence on contemporary visual perception while asserting the irreplaceable value of direct artistic engagement with consciousness transformation.

The thousands of excitation brushstrokes display an extraordinary chromatic range, from deep ultramarines and viridians in the aqueous depths to pale yellows and lavenders in the atmospheric passages, creating what Orlik terms "chromatic vibrations", subtle colour interactions that generate optical effects analogous to musical harmonics. This sophisticated visual field transcends both Neo-Impressionist divisionism and comic book illustration through the integration of quantum theoretical concepts with practical pigment application, creating surfaces that appear to oscillate between material substance and pure energy.

The painting thus aspires to a synesthetic experience, translating visual phenomena into tactile and auditory sensations that engage multiple sensory modalities simultaneously. The limpid pool seems to echo with subaqueous sounds, and the air pulsates with cosmic tones, validating Orlik's goal of creating "quantum painting" that operates beyond conventional optical boundaries while drawing upon the complete spectrum of twentieth-century visual culture from Seurat's scientific colour theory to Stan Lee's cosmic narratives to Ben-Day dot printing aesthetics.

Orlik's theoretical writings reveal a profound engagement with musical principles, particularly his concept of "brush lines, like dancers responding to a musical score, the score being the picture's subject." The Mermaid in Central Park exemplifies this philosophy through its rhythmic brushwork; the excitation marks serve as visual notes, creating complex polyrhythmic patterns that evoke the acoustics of underwater environments and cosmic harmonies.

The painting's follicular element deserves attention within this musical framework. As Orlik noted regarding hair in his work, "you can do so much with it" and here it becomes a symbol itself of receptivity and listening. The luxuriant beehive hair envelopes the mermaid’s head with undulating strands of red, teal, amber and gold. It is both speaker and elongated microphone: she is attuned and alert, receptive to the cosmic hum.

The painting's overall structure follows principles derived from classical music composition: exposition (the celestial apparition), development (the crater landscape), and recapitulation (the mermaid’s centralised presence). However, within this framework, Orlik employs what might be termed "quantum improvisation", allowing individual brushstrokes to respond spontaneously to emerging patterns, creating the kind of complex emergent order characteristic of jazz performance.

Contemporary viewers might hear echoes of Philip Glass's repetitive structures or Brian Eno's ambient soundscapes in the painting's hypnotic rhythms. The work anticipates the fascination with new age and electronic music that featured cosmic themes and synthetic textures, suggesting Orlik's prescient understanding of cultural trends that would emerge throughout the 1980s and beyond.

For Orlik himself, Mermaid in Central Park represents both artistic synthesis and personal mythology operating through what Native American tradition calls the ‘heyoka’, the sacred clown who reveals truth through paradox and inversion. The mermaid embodies the condition as a perpetual outsider, neither fully European nor American, neither completely abstract nor figurative, neither purely mystical nor entirely materialist. Like the ‘heyoka’, who teaches through contrary action, the painting reveals profound truths about consciousness and the cosmos through the seemingly impossible conjunction of aquatic mythology within urban reality. 

The painting documents the artist’s search for what he terms "the invisible depth of microscopic agitations of atoms", the fundamental reality underlying surface appearances, discovered through what might be called "metaphysical displacement." Born into post-war upheaval as the child of Polish-Belarusian refugees who had witnessed the mechanised horrors of twentieth-century warfare, Orlik possessed the "displaced person's gift of prophecy", the capacity to perceive civilisational patterns invisible to those embedded within cultural assumptions. His childhood trajectory through Polish resettlement camps in Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds created acute sensitivity to the collision between worlds, the violent intersections where one cultural system displaces another. This experience of cultural liminality finds perfect expression in the mermaid figure, who exists perpetually between elements, forever emerging from primordial depths while remaining connected to the source.

The Central Park setting holds biographical significance, as it represents the artist's refuge from Manhattan's aggressive architectural environment. In interviews, Orlik describes "needing the green" as a form of relief from the city's relentless verticality. The park becomes a kind of sacred grove where mythological encounters remain possible, a space where the rational urban grid gives way to organic forms and archetypal narratives, allowing for the "circus-like" performance of consciousness transformation.

The painting thus functions as both an artistic statement and a spiritual autobiography, documenting Orlik's quest for "quantum consciousness", an awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness underlying apparent separation. The mermaid becomes his alter ego, the part of himself capable of navigating between visible and invisible worlds while maintaining the sacred clown's capacity for revealing cosmic truths through seemingly impossible conjunctions.

Viewed from our current historical moment, Mermaid in Central Park appears remarkably prescient, anticipating several cultural developments that have become central to 21st-century discourse. The painting's ecological sensibility, its presentation of human and natural elements as interpenetrating systems, prefigures contemporary environmental consciousness and climate change activism.

The pixelated quality of the excitation technique anticipates the transformation of the visual experience by digital culture. At the same time, the painting's themes of virtual reality and alternate dimensions resonate with internet-age concerns about the relationship between physical and digital realms. The mermaid's hybrid nature resonates with current discussions of fluid identity and transgender experience, suggesting new forms of embodiment that transcend traditional binary categories.

The work's integration of scientific and spiritual perspectives aligns with growing interest in consciousness studies, quantum physics, and the intersection of ancient wisdom traditions with contemporary research. Orlik's "quantum painting" methodology anticipates current artistic engagement with systems theory, complexity science, and emergent phenomena.

Mermaid in Central Park stands as one of Henry Orlik's great masterpieces. This work successfully synthesises his theoretical investigations with his profound artistic gifts to create a genuinely unique contribution to surrealist practice. The painting transcends mere illustration of mythological themes to become "alchemical", a transformative encounter that changes both creator and viewer through the very process of engagement.

The work embodies Orlik's conviction that authentic art must be "polysemous", capable of operating simultaneously across what Dante identified as four levels of meaning: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. On the literal level, we encounter a mermaid within an urban park; allegorically, she represents the soul's journey through cosmic gestation and the visual fulfilment of Breton's Arcanum 17 prophecy; morally, she embodies the integration of opposing forces necessary for psychological wholeness within contemporary fragmented consciousness; and anagogically, she reveals the mystical truth that consciousness permeates all matter, connecting individual experience to universal creation patterns revealing ultimate reality through paradoxical conjunction.

The work's enduring power derives from its successful navigation of multiple paradoxes: it is simultaneously ancient and ultramodern, representational and abstract, personal and universal, material and spiritual.

Through his revolutionary excitation technique, which possesses "the sensitivity of a lie-detector," Orlik creates what amounts to a new artistic language, one capable of expressing the fundamental energy patterns underlying both psychological and physical reality while maintaining the sacred clown's capacity for revealing cosmic truths through seemingly impossible conjunctions.

As we face the challenges of our era, environmental crises, technological disruptions, and social fragmentation, Orlik's vision of integrated consciousness offers both a diagnosis and a potential remedy. The mermaid in her cosmic womb suggests that transformation requires descent into primordial depths before ascension becomes possible, embodying the eternal principle that "there is no separateness in reality, everything flows into one another, everything is related." The painting reminds us that art's highest function may be precisely this: to make visible the invisible connections that unite all existence, to reveal the quantum field of pure potential that awaits activation through human consciousness.

In the end, Mermaid in Central Park achieves what Orlik set as his ultimate goal: it becomes "something larger than oneself", a doorway into expanded awareness, a quantum portal where dreams and reality merge in the eternal dance of becoming. The painting stands as testimony to art's enduring capacity to transform consciousness, and offer transformation, to change the world itself, revealing that when individual vision reaches sufficient depth through technical mastery and spiritual discipline, it inevitably touches the collective dimensions of human awareness, creating new cartographies for understanding contemporary existence while connecting present experience to eternal human patterns.