‘Paintings proving angels are really watching over us’ is a series of paintings of cloud constellations resembling angels. The clouds, taking up most of the surface of the painting are contextualized and scaled by a small strip of landscape at the bottom and bordered by a weathered window frame painted in a trompe ‘oeil style. The clouds in the paintings, sometimes faithfully represented and in other cases a bit distorted and edited, are based on photographs shared on social media and entertainment articles on the internet. Also, the title of the series is an adaptation of such an article on a popular website, originally titled: ‘Six photo’s proving angels are really watching over us.’ The painter, changing the word ‘photos’ for ‘painting’, complicates and problematizes the eccentric claim of the series, and the relationship between sign, referent and thought. A remarkable article on Fox news, significant for this series is titled: ‘9/11 cloud formation shows firefighter walking toward angel’. The photo of this cloud formation was taken by a teacher from Florida on 9/11/201. He posted the photo on Facebook saying: “It might be because today is 9/11, but this is the cloud formation I saw driving into work today. Doesn’t it look like a firefighter running with a hose and an angel with the sun perfectly behind it?”, alongside the hashtags “Never Forget” and “Patriot Day.” People manufacturing such associations of meaning out of thin air might in most cases be just a harmless expression of being typically human, but a news outlet reporting this is somewhat problematic and silly.

The parts, sourced pictures and title, out of which these paintings are made into a whole, are all appropriated, adopted, adapted and distorted found internet material, and the landscapes are no exception. They are, sometimes rather unfaithful and distorted, rearranged of fragments of landscape paintings of master painters from the 19th century; Izaac Levitan and Vladimir Orlovsky. It is a way for the painter to pay homage to these, largely forgotten, painters, to develop his own painting skills by having a small one-sided apprenticeship with these painters of the past, and to intentionally place the work in a tradition of landscape painting, and thereby adding to its layers of meanings.

The plane of five out of the eight paintings is a bit odd for a landscape painting, it’s vertical and on a scale that traditionally is used for life size portraits of people. This vertical plane with its size highlights the angelic form, the figure the clouds take, fitting almost all to proper within the window frame. The clouds appearing like angels look as if bent in prayer, (Mimiah), counting sins (Menadel), generously blessing the land (Lelahel) or smiting a city (Barael). Postures messing with and mixing our perception with echoes of superstition, increasing the spectator’s confusion about and conflation between cloud and cherubim, mere meteorology and the miraculous.

Barael is somewhat of an outlier within the series since it has unlike the other ones a cityscape instead of a natural landscape. Its anthropomorphized cloud looks malevolent and mad, demonic almost, reminiscent of Goya’s giants walking through dark landscapes. While the other paintings aren’t situated in a particular time or place, Barael is very precisely located. The cityscape depicts Gaza-City in half October 2023 when the Israeli regime just started its annihilation of the city. Instead of a cloud the shape might very well be the smoke of bomb. It might be worth noting that the ‘eyes’ in the cloud are not made-up embellishments by the artist to enhance the intensity of the work. The painted cloud is a faithful copy of the source image used for this painting. The painting is a testament to what the painter witnessed livestreamed every day.

The trompe l’oeil window frames serve a few purposes; a technical one being increasing a sense of depth and space on a two dimensional surface. The frame with its rusty screws is life size, pushing the clouds, that are not life size obviously, in the far distant through its difference in size. A second function is a pictorial one; the trompe l’oeil window frame is an attempt to merge the pictorial, represented world with the ‘real’ world. Many representational or figurative paintings are their own pictorial world that begins and stops at the edges of the canvas. A trompe l’oeil painting pretends to be an integral, undivided part of our world. In this case seemingly integral with the architecture of the wall and windows of the building it hangs in. The frames’ most important purpose perhaps is a theatrical as well as historical one; it functions as prop, in a sense breaking the fourth wall, turning the spectator into a rückenfigur (back-figure, a old compositional devise in painting popularized by painters like Caspar David Friedrich and other painters of romanticism). The rückenfigur in a Caspar David Friedrich painting gazing at a landscape typically leaning on a windowsill becomes in ‘Eight paintings proving angels are really watching over us’ the spectator of the painting itself in real life looking at the work.

This rückenfigur standing in front of these paintings, might at first sight see beautiful visions of light and hope. But once one reflects on them longer and peers behind its deceptive surface, there’s something more ominous going on. Not so much in the clouds themselves or the representations of them in paint, but in humans as believing, half or less aware, meaning manufacturing spectators. Manufacturing meaning in places where there is none, that is to say; where there is no objective or actual relation between sign, referent and thought. Fox news editors reporting about a man seeing 9/11 in a cloud in 2019? There’s nothing of journalistic value there. But there is ideological or propagandistic value: catering to the patriotic feelings of an audience and reinforcing and magnifying such loyalties by associating them with the spiritual. A fleeting clump of clouds illuminated from a certain angle verifies the presence of a spiritual entity? really? What has hope to do with clouds, meteorological phenomena, the weather? What have angels to do with clouds if you think about it? It might be an unconscious mental relic from the past when our species located the spiritual realm with its entities, in places just out of reach for humans: mountaintops, or just a bit higher, between the clouds. Only since flight has become a mode of transportation for humans, we palpably know how near and earthly clouds actually are. And how void of spiritual beings. How come people pull hope from seeing sunbeams beautifully arranged through clouds? A painting by Sigmar Polke titled: ‘Hope is pulling clouds’, seems more apt. Surely these associations and false consciousnesses happen on an instinctual level outside of the light of self-awareness. When one would ask the teacher of Florida if the angelic shaped cloud really had an actual connection with 9/11, apart from his personal associations, he would very likely hold there actually not to be an objective connection. If not deliberately (self) criticized, illuminated reflectively, we don’t tend to see reality as it appears, but as we want to see it, as it fits within the boundaries of the worldview we hold or hold dear.

The title of the series then, ‘Eight paintings proving angels are really watching over us’, can hardly not be read as sarcasm. But there’s more going on than just that. It’s also a very serious acknowledgement that this meaning manufacturing nature of us, clumsily conditioned in the twilight between awareness, instinct and blind subconscious is as real as it gets. With all the consequences of it.