(Double click on the image to view the gallery without interference of arrows and captions)

   Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was a Jesuit priest, geologist, and paleontologist (he was part of the team that discovered Peking Man), who married science, mysticism, and Catholicism in a radical theory of evolution for the space age. Parker notes that the “gigantic leaf, pod, and vegetative forms” in the Teilhard paintings are “suggestive” to him of Teilhard’s “thesis of types of dematerialization and transformation hinted at in The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu. The Roman Catholic Church prohibited the publication of these works as heretical until after Teilhard’s death. Nonetheless, Parker refers to almost all of his works in the Homage series as the “Teilhard de Chardin fans,” an indirect reference, I believe, to Teilhard’s graphical representation of a spiraling, fan-shaped evolutionary trajectory moving toward a future “Omega Point,” when and where everything in the universe helixes toward a final point of unification and state of divine consciousness. 

   In her excellent synthesis of Teilhard’s thought, Susan Rakoczy explains that Teilhard regarded evolution as a process where “Christ’s presence, in the form of love,” is “the energy that moves creation forward” as that process and the “expansion of the universe continue. . . .Through these ideas he united matter—which had so fascinated him as a budding geologist as a child—with the Incarnation, the process of God becoming human in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus matter was transfigured and made holy in Christ. This integration overcame the dualism that had permeated Christianity from its early encounter with Greek philosophy [with its] conviction that spirit is good while matter is not.” (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/pierre-teilhard-de-chardin-prophet-cosmic-hope/)These ideas are important, not only because Parker’s art remained informed by Teilhard de Chardin’s theology through the 1970s but also because I believe the large themes of rapprochement, transformation, and unification of matter and spirit motivated all of Parker’s art, from the Cybele and Attis paintings of his postgraduate years to the photographs in the Tattoo Stigmata, Der Wilde Mann, and Temperaments series of the 1980s to 2000s.  In the latter, of course, he explored the unification of masculine and earth archetypes that have been severed from each other over centuries of philosophical dualism, which, of course, drove the American notion of manifest destiny and, globally, multiple forms of imperialism and authoritarianism.

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—Catherine-Nevil Parker