Salvatrix Mundu
SALVATRIX MUNDU......
Salvatrix Mundu is the title of my latest artwork, a 24 square metre canvas featuring a female figure in a setting with many symbols to fathom. It is about the present (need for a) transition in human society.
The title may remind one of Salvator Mundi, the painting attributed by some to Leonardo Da Vinci and recently sold at auction for $450 million. ‘Salvator Mundi ’ is the Latin for ‘(Male) Saviour of the World.’ (For many (not the few), a painting selling for such a sum is a sign that the world needs saving, or that we need saving from the world.)
The title of my painting, ‘Salvatrix Mundu ’ means ‘ (Female) Saviour of the Whole World.’
If you look on the internet or anywhere for a translation of ‘saviour of the world’ into Latin you’ll be given the male version. However, at this time in human history, it may be appropriate to consider that the patriarchal ‘man’s world’ is not on course to save the world but more likely to destroy it.
I would associate the ‘man’s world’ with the desire for power and dominance, ergo, inevitably, war, conflict, and inequality. Not just a destructive dominance over other people but over nature and the planet.
But this ‘man’s world’ is the world of human society and not the ‘whole world’. We might refer to the ‘whole world’ as Gaia, the Earth mother goddess that includes all nature and humankind as one.
This is the (w)holistic view
And if humankind becomes over dominant at the expense of too much other life and Gaia, then (in the Gaia hypothesis) humankind may be destroyed by nature, or by itself, for the sake of life as a whole.
For me, ‘the whole world’ also refers to the multiverse, the real or possible existence of other worlds and other realities, or the natural and the supernatural, the knowable and the unknowable, the finite and the infinite, the tonal and the nagual.
Where we believe too much in the (material) world or ‘the real world’ as the only world (in denial of a whole multiverse) then it inspires greed over a limited territory and seeing ‘worldly success’ as the best measure of the human being. But in a multiversal universe, that worldly success may mean being too bound up in the one world and a consequent failure to access or see other worlds.
And that greed and competition for worldly success, is what, ironically, is also wrong with the one world and leads to its ruin. So, for the sake (or saviour) of the one world alone, we need to see or imagine or dream the multiverse and other worlds.
Appropriately, Salvatrix Mundu will first be unveiled/shown outside the front of my house for the ‘whole world’ to see, without having to enter the rarified or exclusive confines of an artworld /art gallery.
