And as it takes shape and is built, like a thousand-year-old cathedral that tends towards the sky, this work rises, enclosing within itself all those suggestions, declining them with the greatest sensitivity. Precision, balance and harmony of shapes, masses and volumes: each image by Rodney Smith seems to be governed by the laws of mathematics. Ultimately, they are all tiny architectures that are at once ephemeral and eternal and that respond to the ancestral idea of the divine proportion, to the golden section, to the sacred equation at the basis of many masterpieces in the history of art and nature, and which Smith’s work continues to decline to infinity.

In this double frame of reality, in this dreamlike and unreal universe, the laws of gravity and terrestrial attraction are challenged. It is Rodney Smith who redefines, applies and governs them. Here he is magician and illusionist, like Georges Méliès who, at the dawn of the history of cinema, was able to transport spectators into his A Trip to the Moon (1902) through a clever expedient. For his part, Smith leads us into the paradise of his dreams, “into a world as he would have liked it to be”.

Ethereal and ecstatic in nature, his photographs contain only what is original, leaving no trace, no clue of the places, time or circumstances of what Smith shows us. They hide rather than reveal, they withdraw rather than meet the observer. In essence, they always hide something rather than restore a reality whose essence is ultimately unknown. Paradoxically, Smith sows doubt precisely through photography, an infallible and invincible instrument for reproducing reality. His images are like ellipses that unravel the fabric of the dream with which our lives are woven, as the magician Prospero says in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. They seem to skim the epidermis of things without ever passing through them.

They stretch out over the great cosmic void or over the world of human beings, and we do not know whether they are about to take flight or fall. In both cases, they are sensitive bodies that change space and, like Alice, experiment with the air to pass through their own mirror. And it is then that they access – but without actually appearing there – the world of phantasmagoria, of the deceptive image, which enchants and obsesses, which makes us let go of reality and transports us far away, into our childhood imagination. Smith’s ghosts do not vanish at dawn: they are simulacra that watch us.

Everything is carefully obliterated, like the steps that lead to a secret place that cannot be returned to, since every trace has been covered. Only Smith knows how to access it, since this place belongs to him. It was he, like a divine geometer, who drew its contours. In this place, the sun is always at midday, at its solstice: there is no shadow cast to attest to the reality of what one sees, since an object without a shadow does not exist. Here, day does not rejoin night, night will no longer spill over into the next morning – everything is crystallized like a sliver of light stuck forever in the permanence of the world. Time is an invention of human beings, eternity belongs to the divine. Each image of Smith takes us back to a lost paradise where white light reigns supreme.

These passages together form an underground gallery in which Smith precedes us and guides us, but it is up to us to choose the destination of this nocturnal journey. Images like arrows shot through the centuries, tear the human sky and open onto an ancestral night of remote times. If painting is a “mental thing”, as Leonardo da Vinci said, Smith demonstrates to what extent art draws inspiration from the Platonic idea that precedes it.