Page 9 - Art First: Karel Nel: Observe

images that they receive from remote time-space, since it is only through
some form of visual and bodily alignment that the images can begin to
be interpreted. Nel recalls:
I will never forget the powerful moment in Paris when I finally understood
the general location of the Cosmos’ two degree field in the night sky by the
description that, if one closed one eye and fully extended one’s arm, then
the field of study was approximately two thumb-prints by two thumb-prints,
just below the constellation of Leo (2).

2
Nel, who has often been jokingly but affectionately described as ‘the
eye’ by his colleagues because of his deep interest in the visual, makes
a case for its primacy: the creation of lenses, ‘optic stones’, from the
11th century onwards in Europe gradually opened up realms of obser-
vation not possible with the naked eye. The distant became closer, and
the minute became larger. Humans had, through this single technology
expanded the spectrum of the visual, and, by doing so, extended the
span of consciousness itself. To look is to aspire. To look involves curiosity,
desire for knowledge and the need oftentimes to deduce from what has
become visually evident.
Astronomers look out into the great distances of the universe through
telescopes into a visual and mental abstraction in an attempt to under-
stand phenomena such as large scale structures and galaxy formation.
This activity is unlike that of the physician who is able to press a shoulder,
feel anomalies in the body with his own hands, test the temperature of
the forehead by touch or who can now scan the deep structures of the
Orbicular presences detail brain and body.

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