The Examined Life : Artwork 2

Descartes arrived at his famous three words not in a library but in a state of radical self-stripping — everything that could be doubted, doubted. What remained was not comfortable: only the bare fact of thinking itself, offered as the sole evidence that anything exists at all. This second design treats that austerity as an aesthetic. Where the ornate version approaches the phrase through the tradition of humanist lettering — curves, flourishes, the warmth of the scholar's study — this one approaches it through architecture and material. Cut from raw metal, the three words are monumental and unyielding, their letterforms interlocking in a flat relief composition that reads differently from across the room than it does close up. The texture of the metal is not incidental: there is something right about a philosophy about the irreducible minimum being rendered in the most undeceived material available. A double-height wall, a creative studio, or any space where the ambition is to have nothing on the wall that cannot hold its own weight.