Ceci n’est pas une flamme

Description

I did not carve fire — I found the moment when it had already almost become wood, and stopped it before it could change its mind.

This is cypress — old, dense, holding within its grain the kind of memory that accumulates over decades. When I took this fragment in my hands, it felt as though it had been snatched straight out of a fire, still alive, still lunging upward in a sharp, twisting gesture — and forced to freeze in mid-air, halfway through that motion. Not after the fire. Inside it.

I did not apply the dark markings on the surface — I only cleared away what already looked like soot, like the trace of a burn, though this is, of course, a deception: cypress never burned. It simply grew in such a way that it now mimics flame more convincingly than flame itself has ever managed to burn. I like this deception. There is something in it of the logic of dreams, where you trust your eyes more than the laws of physics.

Smooth surfaces, as though melted, sit here beside jagged, seemingly charred edges — I left both states side by side, without reconciling them: one half of the form recalls polish and stillness, the other still convulses, as though the lunge out of the fire never fully finished, but simply froze halfway through.

I made the thin metal pin almost invisible — the form needs to float, cut loose from any wick, any source, any reason to burn. It is precisely in this break in logic that the whole meaning lives for me: an image instantly recognized as fire — and which, in the same instant, stops obeying the rules fire is supposed to follow.

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