It lurks on the shop shelf and beyond the line of the horizon. Just around the corner and on the other side of the river. It keeps us company as we wash the dishes and on our daily walks. It has its origins in our culture, which, like a multi-episode series on Netflix, makes us live through this absorbing spectacle in ever new instalments, elaborately toying with our nerves: the end of the world.

We live in constant expectation of a potential catastrophe. Every smallest action bears the mark of responsibility for a well-known or sensed apocalypse and of a debilitating lack of agency. Setting out on every journey, even the shortest, everyday one, we come across many ends of the world.

The anxiety we carry at the back of our minds can be triggered by anything. A piece of news, a view, a situation that changes our perception. Spaces on the margins are conducive to it. Featureless ones, but also those that arouse a morbid fascination. A landscape marked by attempts at urbanisation and the drawing of lines, and wasteland, bushes, roadsides and riverbanks. These places connect us with the area of our surroundings which, paradoxically, seems stable in relation to the pace of our lives. But that landscape swells with (and in) time, bloats and begins to spill over.

The Spanish cape of Finisterre and a volcanic eruption build a drama in the landscape not at all remote from the view of a bus terminus on the edge of a small town or a hole in the ground encountered on the road. And there, a step further on, a completely different reality potentially begins. Before that border is crossed, a quiet drama may be playing out. A significant event in life that changes the perception of a place and shapes memory. When we add to it a premonition of the end and a fear of having no influence over known and coming catastrophes, we have the full spectrum of ends of the world. We then enter a broader scale: socio-cultural, that of civilisation, of the planet. Here the end of the world repeats in cycles, creates grand narratives and works on our imagination.

Such points in life and on the map are places where a sudden and irreversible disruption occurs.

The painting is an imperfect artefact that tries to peer beyond that border.

The end of the world need not be anything significant, but it may turn out to be… pretty. After all, to some degree it keeps us company every day. For such a very long time now.

Text: Agnieszka Wach