Standing before Snakes & Eagle, NYC, is to enter a street that exists in no atlas, yet the subject feels immediately familiar: a thoroughfare of the unconscious, where mythological archetypes jostle with Wild West gunslingers, and where a rapacious creature tears through the composition like a bad thought you cannot quite dismiss. Henry Orlik painted this monumental acrylic during his American sojourn in the early 1980s, when New York represented both liberation and peril for him. The canvas seethes with spiralling brushstrokes, like subatomic matter responding to external force; every surface of this painting vibrates with energy that refuses to settle into stillness.

The composition embodies horror vacui, the Latin term for an abhorrence of empty space, a phenomenon evident in the densely populated panels of Hieronymus Bosch and the intricate carpet pages of Insular illuminated manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells (c. 800 CE, Trinity College Dublin). As the art historian Ernst Gombrich observed, such ornamented patterns function as frames for sacred imagery, and there is something ritualistic in Orlik's refusal to leave any portion of the canvas unworked. Yet his approach differs from mere decorative compulsion; the excitations generate a unified field of kinetic potential, recalling the optical experiments of Georges Seurat in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte(1884–1886, Art Institute of Chicago). Whereas Seurat's dots create a static shimmer, Orlik's spirals suggest perpetual motion, matter in a state of continuous becoming.

Dominating the left portion stands a female figure whose bearing announces her as something more than mortal. A crescent crowns her head, unmistakably the attribute of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and untamed nature. In classical iconography, Diana appears with bow and quiver; here she carries instead four brightly coloured threads in curved arms that simultaneously read as flowing hair. Her eyes double as her breasts in an anatomical condensation that owes much to Surrealist metamorphosis. What are these threads? Orlik has suggested they might be ideas, inspiration, 'sacred fire', something to be nurtured and passed on. The figure proceeds with purpose: 'she's quite sedate,' the artist has remarked, 'she has bars: she is her own person, composed, knows what she is doing.' Those bars, rendered as horizontal lines across her lower torso, resemble the strings of Apollo's lyre; they also recall the tensioned sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, who in 1939 began incorporating string into her biomorphic carvings to express 'the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.' For Hepworth, the strings were not void but planes of movement, dynamism, hidden forces. The Diana figure embodies comparable tensions: vulnerability set against self-possession, openness against reserve, the protective guardian who is herself protected by the geometry of her form.

Naum Gabo, the Constructivist sculptor whose Linear Construction in Space No. 4 (1957, various collections) employed similar stringing techniques, believed sculpture should express the true nature of time and motion. His 1920 Realist Manifesto, co-authored with his brother Antoine Pevsner, rejected naturalism in favour of space, light, and the kinetic. The bars across Diana's torso participate in this tradition; they assert that a figure need not be solid to be substantial, and that emptiness contained within form generates its own presence. When Diana wades through this hallucinatory Manhattan streetscape, she carries the inheritance of mid-century British abstraction: the belief that sculpture and painting might articulate forces invisible to the naked eye.

At the composition's centre, a creature of extraordinary violence erupts. Part bird, part nightmare, its grey-feathered body tears through the picture plane with a gaping red beak. 'Hungry like a bird,' Orlik has noted, 'greedy, grasping, wanting to be fed.' This beast ricochets through the scene, 'whistling through, sending off, ricocheting, bad feeling.' Its crescent-shaped beak mirrors the lunar crescent atop Diana's head; together they would form a circle. The implication is profound. In Daoist philosophy, yin and yang are complementary forces, not antagonists but necessary counterparts whose interaction constitutes the totality of existence. The Tao Te Ching teaches that without darkness there can be no light, without the base no elevation. 'Do you need both?' the artist has asked. 'Good and bad? All exists at the same time. Like day and night.'

The predatory creature inevitably evokes the myth of Diana and Actaeon, recounted in Ovid's Metamorphoses and immortalised by Titian in Diana and Actaeon (1556–1559, National Gallery, London and National Galleries of Scotland) and The Death of Actaeon (c. 1559–1575, National Gallery, London). In the myth, the young hunter stumbles upon the goddess bathing and is transformed into a stag, then torn apart by his own hounds, who can no longer recognise their master. Is the grey creature one of Diana's hunting beasts, released to pursue an interloper? Or does it represent a darker aspect of the goddess herself, the destructive capacity inherent in every protective force? 'Is the bad spirit attacking her or is it one of her hunting dogs?' the artist has wondered. The painting refuses resolution; it holds multiple interpretations in suspension, demanding that the viewer occupy the unsettled space between.

To the right of this central maelstrom stands another female figure, brazenly naked save for black stockings, her posture recalling the burlesque performers of nineteenth-century saloons. She is the antithesis of Diana: unashamed, exposed, and revelling in physicality. Beside her, a cowboy figure tilts, his hand poised near his hip ready to draw his holstered pistol, his torso rendered as a shield-like shape suggesting a sheriff's badge. A turquoise serpent winds through his body, its sinuous form evoking both the lasso or whip of the American frontier and the serpent of temptation from the Garden of Eden. 'Snake is alive,' Orlik has observed. 'Is it the snake of temptation, or from the tree of knowledge?' In Genesis, the serpent offers knowledge that leads to expulsion from paradise; here, the snake threads through a figure already armed, already implicated in the violence of the Wild West.

The collision of mythological and American imagery collapses chronology. 'The whole street scene becomes the Wild West, which is also the streets of NY,' the artist has explained. 'Different time, different place, different form: but still the same.' This temporal fluidity links the painting to the Surrealist interest in dream logic, where events from disparate eras coexist without contradiction. Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York) similarly depicts time as malleable, its melting watches suggesting a realm where sequential logic no longer applies. In Orlik's streetscape, the layers accumulate: a Roman goddess, a Wild West gunslinger, a burlesque dancer, a flouncy-skirted woman from a bygone era, all proceeding along the same thoroughfare, 'a teeming mass of humanity: life goes on anyway even amongst bad spirit.'

A white serpentine line undulates through the lower portion of the canvas, offering a moment of visual rest amid the general agitation. William Hogarth, in his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty, proposed that the S-shaped curve was the ultimate expression of aesthetic grace, 'leading the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety.' Straight lines, Hogarth argued, signify stasis or death; the serpentine suggests liveliness and movement. 'Can you imagine it if it wasn't white,' the artist has asked, 'it needs it there.' The line functions as a moment of stillness within perpetual motion, a place where the eye may rest before plunging once more into the teeming scene. It also carries associations with the double helix of DNA, the molecular structure encoding organic life, and with the channels of kundalini energy in tantric philosophy, where two serpentine forces spiral up the spine to achieve expanded consciousness. These scientific and spiritual connotations coexist; the serpentine line is simultaneously an aesthetic device, a biological metaphor, and a symbol of transformation.

Above the composition, a dark, nest-like form hovers, as though a rent had opened in the firmament to admit malevolent forces. 'It needed to be there,' the artist has stated. ‘Who knows where these bad spirits come from? Like a demon. Like a portal.' This aperture adds a dimension of cosmic unease, suggesting that the street scene we witness is merely one layer of a reality containing forces beyond comprehension. The chromatic register reinforces this unsettled atmosphere. Washed-out pinks and lavenders suffuse the upper portions, recalling the diffused light of urban dusk; warmer ochres and siennas anchor the lower zones. The occasional shock of turquoise, appearing in the serpent and scattered accents, punctuates the composition with moments of cold clarity. The palette recalls Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510, Museo del Prado, Madrid), with its muted lime greens and pinks populating a hallucinatory garden of delights and torments. Like Bosch, Orlik refuses to separate the sacred from the profane; his figures inhabit a world governed by dream logic rather than chronological sequence.

The figures resemble musical notes scattered across an unwritten score. 'They are animated like the Winos in Central Park,' the artist has observed of a related painting, 'like musical notes. Alive and full of energy.' Even as the predatory creature pours through their midst, they persist: the cowboy with his jaunty hat, the dancer unabashed, the guardian proceeding with her threads of inspiration. There is humour here, an endearing look at the human condition. 'We can laugh at ourselves, in a philosophical way,' Orlik suggests. 'Which character are we? Do we have bits of each in us? A bad spirit can whistle through: that's life, what can you do? Just dance or be ready to shoot. Or take your ideas, dreams, inspiration and give them to someone else, pass them on.' The philosophical stance is neither cynical nor naïve; it acknowledges the darkness that penetrates every existence while affirming the persistence of beauty, purpose, and human endeavour.

For Orlik, the painting represents an 'intense feeling' associated with New York, a city that both liberated and threatened him during his four years there. 'I changed as a person in NY,' he has recalled. 'I became free, a man, not tethered by family or other restrictions.' Yet the canvas also registers the cost of that freedom: the predators inhabiting every landscape, external and internal alike. The coloured threads Diana carries might be understood as the artist's own paintings, his creative offspring, requiring protection until they can be released into the world. In Mother Flight, another of Orlik's compositions, a bird carries red threads that have broken free from their tethers, symbolising the liberation of pure ideas from the constraints of education, upbringing, and societal expectation. 'Everybody has their own private way, their own rules,' the artist has noted, 'but carry intrinsic ideas, beliefs with them; they can be freed to become themselves elsewhere, a potential to develop their consciousness freed from bounds.'

What would it mean to look at this painting every day? The artist himself has posed this question. Each viewing, he suggests, would reveal something different; the work resists being reduced to a fixed meaning. 'It isn't resolved for me either,' he has admitted, a confession that speaks to the painting's essential openness. In this respect, Snakes & Eagle, NYC functions as a meditation object, a visual problem that provokes contemplation rather than conclusion. One might dwell on the Diana figure and consider what it means to carry purpose through a hazardous world; one might focus on the raptor and confront the violence within consciousness; one might trace the serpentine line and ponder the biological and spiritual forces sustaining existence. The painting accommodates all these engagements without privileging any single approach.

In the early 1970s, when Orlik exhibited alongside masterworks by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy at the Surrealist Masters exhibition at Acoris in London, critics recognised in his work a continuation of the Surrealist project by other means. André Breton's original movement dissolved with the onset of the Second World War, but the impulse to render visible the hidden architecture of the psyche persisted among painters who came of age in its long shadow. Snakes & Eagle, NYC is no nostalgic exercise in period style; it investigates matters that remain urgent: the nature of consciousness, the relationship between order and chaos, and the persistence of ancient archetypes in modern settings. Orlik's New York is both the historical metropolis and a theatre of the soul, a place where Diana walks among cowboys and dancers, where bad spirits whistle through crowded streets, and where the possibility of transformation remains perpetually alive. The question the painting poses is not what these figures signify, but what we will do with the recognition of ourselves they provoke.