Panta Rei

Everything flows — a small drawing that holds the weight of a philosophy.

Panta Rei is a studio work by artist Neve, pencils on black cardboard on MDF, 50 × 35 cm, created in 2015.

"Panta Rei" is a colored pencil drawing on black cardboard, 50 × 35 cm. The title is Heraclitus: πάντα ῥεῖ — everything flows. You cannot step into the same river twice, because neither the river nor you are the same as before. The subject is an old man, head bowed, dressed in a white tank top. His skin is mapped by decades — wrinkled, weathered, marked by time the way stone is marked by water. On his shoulder, a tattoo: an eight-pointed star, with text wrapped around it. On his chest, another. Stars — real ones, or painted ones — appear in the dark above him, faint points of light in the black ground of the cardboard. The face is turned down and to one side. It is not grief, not resignation. It is the posture of someone who has been paying attention for a long time and knows that paying attention is what time asks of you. The tattoos are the only permanent thing in a work titled after impermanence. Marks chosen once, carried forward unchanged through all the changes of the body that wears them. Panta rei — and yet the ink remains.