The work explores humanity’s enduring pull toward the ocean —its unpredictability, its magnitude, and its capacity to both enchant and destroy. The title directly references Bas Jan Ader’s final artwork and fatal voyage, during which he attempted to cross the Atlantic in a small sailboat. He disappeared at sea, and his vessel was discovered ten months after leaving New York. His journey stands as a haunting testament to the tension between artistic longing and mortal risk.

At the centre of the composition is a meticulously rendered figure inspired by Paul Thek’s Fisherman(1969): a human body encased within a translucent, fish-shaped vessel, surrendered to the currents. Nearby, subtle motifs evoke the boat that carried Ader to his death.

The entire scene is enveloped in an intense green wash, drawn from J.M.W.Turner’s Snowstorm, a painting that sought to grasp the sublime force of a storm at sea. On the surface of the painting, longing meets danger, attraction meets annihilation. Longing and risk, attraction and annihilation, merging and destruction, desire and fatality, art and ritual, self and myth are all brought together on the painterly surface.

Dr.Elena Stylianou