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

(Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid)

A bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen by
Georg Lober was placed in Central Park in 1956 to commemorate the Danish author’s
150th birthday. Andersen
wrote the children’s stories, The Little
Mermaid, The Emperor’s New Clothes
and The
Ugly Duckling amongst other
classics. Since then,
children have gathered around the sculpture in Central Park on Saturdays to
hear stories, fairytales and folktales.

In Orlik’s painting, the mermaid has stepped
out of Andersen’s imagination into Orlik’s
and she has migrated from her rock by Copenhagen harbour (The
Little Mermaid, Edvard
Eriksen’s famous bronze sculpture, 1913, Langelinie promenade) to sit by a pool
in Central Park surrounded by crazy paving and writhing dunes which disappear
to the horizon, under a night sky. She, the landscape
and sky have become invigorated by Orlik’s pulsating excitation brushstrokes.
And the Mermaid, unlike her statue which
sits soulfully gazing out to sea, has one knee raised as if she is about to
rise and dive into the water. She
is no longer of bronze but is animated,
ready to flee from her inanimate structure. Her
hair rises like an antenna, fizzing with energy, as if receiving or listening
to a call from beyond – the call of the wild. A
rounded red and white object sits in the sky above her and appears to be ‘calling’
to the Mermaid – emitting signals from its centre from which emerge
strange red and white striped bones, wings
or fins. Perhaps it
is a portal, perhaps a mouth or an
eye, but it is sending her the means to escape, to re-grow her Mermaid fins or
galvanize her human limbs. The
landscape is not the landscape of Central Park but a wild desert, alive with
movement; a friendly cactus pops up between the dunes and seems to beckon her –
enticing her back to freedom. The
pool is restricted and small; it is no longer the open sea that she once knew
but bordered neatly by crazy paving – a sign of the times.
It is the only water she can now see but
the dunes beckon like the waves of the open sea.

Mermaids or Melusine appear as a theme in several of Orlik’s work. The
Melusine developed from European folklore into an alchemical symbol in the 16th century when they became a symbol of the philosopher’s stone, a
means of transformation by bridging the visible and the invisible. This
is significant in terms of Orlik’s excitations which are representative of
quanta, symbolising both energy and matter.
The Melusine was popular in tales written
in the 19th century and reinterpreted by André Breton in Arcanum 17 (1945), the Star Tarot card, in which
the Melusine becomes a symbol of hope and alchemical renewal. Breton
described the timeless bewitching alure of the Melusine:

‘under the landslide
of her tarnished hair … that distinctive type that has always conquered poets
because time on her has no hold…

This creature exists and if she is not endowed with complete
awareness of her power, it is nevertheless true that she is the apparition you
see from farther and farther away at the railroad switch, … And she’s Bilqis
with eyes so long that even in profile they seem full face, and she’s Cleopatra
on the morning of Actium, and she’s the young sorceress of Michelet with the
eyes of a heath, and she’s Bettina by the side of a waterfall … and she is –
even more devious because of her very impassiveness – Gustave Moreau’s fairy
with the griffon, and she’s you.’

(André Breton, Arcanum
17, trans.
By Zack Rogow, Green Integer, 2004, p.
83)

Orlik’s painting could serve as illustration
for a passage in Breton’s Arcanum 17 (pp.
88-89), in which the object in his sky becomes the Dog Star, Sirius, the
brightest star in the sky which shines brightest just before dawn:

‘a
much brighter star is inscribed in the center of the original septenary and its points
are of red and yellow fire and it’s
the Dog Star or Sirius, and it’s
Lucifer Light Bearer and it is, in its glory surpassing all the others, the
Morning Star. The landscape
doesn’t light up till the very instant it appears, and at that instant life
brightens again and immediately below the luminous blaze that just gave way to
the ones just mentioned, a young woman is revealed, nude, kneeling by the side
of a pond, and with her right hand she spills into the pond the contents of a
golden urn, while her left hand empties onto the earth an equally inexhaustible
silver urn. Alongside that woman who, beyond Melusina, is Eve and now is all womankind, the
leaves of an acacia rustle to the right while to the left a butterfly flutters
on a bloom.’

Writing just after the second world war, Breton describes the
allegorical meaning of Sirius (pp. 127-128) 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.’
It is ‘connected to the certainty of eternal renewal’ and can only ‘be known by
way of three paths: poetry, liberty, and love.’

A synchronism for Orlik and his Polish roots is that the Melusine
or mermaid appears on the Warsaw coat of arms and in legend is thought of as a
protector of the city.