A lattice, a web: It’s nothing to be sentimental about. You could call it a network in this century or a grid in the last. You could call it silly string or you could call it history.

You could call it work, what Viola is doing, though please, never call it a job. Different vocabularies, the lexicon of craft and the lexicon of the global piecemeal just-on-time shipping-container trade. The canvas on which she’s painted these two seascapes is “leather” which is polyurethane-coated cotton. Something is lost with each conversion but might something be gained? The motion is constant but likewise, as you stand on the shore staring at the sea, is the permanence. It’s an illusion but so are you, particularly if you’ve vagabonded about a bit in life. I’ve wondered how Viola answers some of these questions too hoary to ask. From the outside she resembles a triangle: Cologne, Istanbul, New York City, with the latticework forming vertices at every point of contact edge to edge.

In the collection of the Kolumba Museum in Cologne resides Paul Thek’s The Portable Ocean, which he made in 1969. Where did he live in the 1960s? Everywhere. His ocean is a small, rough-hewn wooden cart, roughly painted in tones from cobalt to aqua, depthless in parts and whitecapped in others. According to one vocabulary it contains regular polyhedrons, per another building blocks, and you tug it along by an indigo cord attached to a disney cutout of an indigo shooting star.

Canım,

I arrived in Cologne, the city is very quiet, and the silence is nice for the moment.

I went to the Kolumba Museum, as you suggested and saw The Portable Ocean. I’m sending you a postcard from there.

Wish you were here, so we could listen to the waves lapping against the bathhouse and go for a swim.

This note is written on a postcard, like one you would affix with a magnet to your own fridge, if you were able to stay in one place for a while. Home, heart, hearth, icebox: The sea always roils yet it is always the same. Two things at once, like the clichés I keep flirting with, true and false together, like a sea over a shanzai logoscape, a paper boat beating ceaselessly against the current. “My darling” is a rough translation of canım, though I am told that literally it means “my life.” Thek was a sentimentalist himself, you know.

Domenick Ammirati