"Gross Pearls" by Micah Heimlich

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GROSS PEARLS
Why do I pause to couch the cataract,
And the grosse pearls from our dull eyes abstract...
Richard … Read more GROSS PEARLS
Why do I pause to couch the cataract,
And the grosse pearls from our dull eyes abstract...
Richard Lovelace

In his work as an architect, designer, and visual artist, Micah Heimlich has often employed the mineral mica – generally in the form of frangible furniture, submarine light fixtures and mirrors (such as his “InterMica” products), and various methods of household cladding and fenestration.
Most recently, the material has reemerged in a series of abstract paintings titled “Gross Pearls” (from the seventeenth-century poem “Peinture” by Richard Lovelace). The metallic, multicolored twelve-inch-square “works on paper” are not easy to categorize, representing as they do a mix of métiers and aesthetic paradigms. At once painting, collage, and ceramics, the series has been created by “brushing” sheets of ceramic fiber paper with layers of colored prismatic powder, affixing to them individual flakes of specially prepared mica, and then baking the assemblages in a temperature-controlled oven. The result is somewhat like Op art: geometric and illusionistic, the entire flashing and vibrating with pattern and movement.
As one might expect from someone named Micah, the artist is clearly into this flakey, opalescent, highly elastic, and ephemeral material. The silicate mineral is commonly found in igneous and metamorphic strata and sometimes in sedimentary rocks, thanks to a long geological process essentially mimicked in the making of the present series. This preexisting telluric beauty is of a vaster kind, compared to which human works of art appear incomplete or imperfect copies. But the French Surrealist philosopher Roger Caillois truly nails it in The Writing of Stones (1970), where he likened
such “incorruptible fragments” to the potential source of all “intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty” in art and nature. As he astutely observes: “No matter what image an artist invents, no matter how distorted, arbitrary, absurd, simple, elaborate or tortured he has made it or how far in appearance from anything known or probable, who can be sure that somewhere in the world’s vast store there is not that image’s likeness, its kin or partial parallel.”
There is no end to the message of mica. In many respects, these creations qualify as paintings in their own right, whether abstract or traditional, with a lineage that can be traced back to those elaborate, inlaid Renaissance picture stones in the Opificio delle pietre dure in Florence. But more importantly, the introduction of mica offers connections with other states of being or aesthetics which are not precisely “past” or “future” but “endowed with a mineral, almost eternal, endurance.” Ultimately, it
represents the endless combinations, the separations, and the losses inherent in the natural order of things – a limpid incorruptibility.

Paul Foss

Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones [1970], trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 3-4. See less