《奔向你來時的光》
文：林若塵 (2025/7)
Running Toward the Light You Came From
By Ruòchén Lin(July 2025)
這幅作品延續了畫家 TiAO一貫的象徵性語言與內在靈性的探索。畫面分為上下兩層視域：下方是一名現代男童，光影投射出角落的幾何空間感；上方則是一對聖母與聖嬰般的形象，浮現在一朵柔藍色花瓣的旋渦之中，彷彿是記憶的光圈，亦或超驗的顯現。
這是一幅關於「起點」與「遺忘」的畫。
在這看似簡潔的畫面裡，孩子正跨步走過，一心向前，無暇回首。他的目光未曾觸及那朵懸在空中的藍色花朵，也未曾知曉那其中安坐著的，是他生命最初的凝視：一位溫柔的女性，懷抱赤裸嬰孩的形象，指涉著宗教中的聖母與聖子，也可能是世間萬母之一，或他自己作為嬰孩時的靈魂肖像。
那宛如花朵盛開的背景，既像是一朵被時光摺疊的玫瑰，也像一層層靈魂之膜，將母子籠罩在一種幾近神聖的記憶場域中。畫家用這樣柔軟與遙遠的色彩，標示了一種無可挽回卻無所不在的存在——母愛，不僅是血緣的，更是原初的依附與庇護。
對比之下，下方行走的孩子，身處的是幾何鋪陳、陰影分明的空間，與上方的圓形花瓣形成強烈對照。上是永恆、柔光與聖性；下是現世、運動與日常。這並不是時間的對立，而是心靈層次的分裂——靈魂總是向光而來，而身體卻時常向前奔去。
這幅畫沒有強迫我們對焦於某一點，它讓視線自然浮移，在母子與孩子之間游移，在時間與空間之間反覆穿梭。它並不解釋什麼，而是召喚我們回到一個問題：我們是否記得，我們曾是那被緊緊抱著的孩子？
這幅畫的結構，看似平易，卻在寧靜中蘊藏著對時空與信仰的深層對話。畫家 TiAO所描繪的，不只是一位奔跑的孩童與空中懸浮的母子，而是一段跨越幾百年、直達文藝復興核心的視覺記憶。
畫面上方，那對安坐於花瓣旋渦中的母子形象，無法不讓人聯想起拉斐爾（Raphael）筆下的《西斯汀聖母》（Sistine Madonna）。同樣是正面直視觀者的聖母，抱持著赤裸的嬰孩，同樣置身於一片非現實的天光之中，不同的是，拉斐爾的畫面環繞著宗教神聖的雲霧與天使，而TiAO所給予的，是一朵不斷舒展、柔藍如水的花——這不是天堂的象徵，而是記憶的皺褶，靈魂出生之處。
這樣的母子構圖，自文藝復興以來，在西方繪畫中是一種典範（icon）：聖母象徵神聖的庇佑與人類的原型情感，而聖嬰則既是神，也是凡人。我們在達文西的《岩間聖母》、卡拉瓦喬的《聖母之死》、甚至現代主義者如培根對「皮耶塔」的解構中，都可以看見這種二元交織：神聖與人性、溫柔與殘酷、永恆與現世。
然而，TiAO 另闢蹊徑。他把神聖拉回人間，把「母子像」放置在一位步行的現代男孩之上——這位穿著 T-shirt、短褲、運動鞋的孩子，似乎與那高懸的母子毫無關聯。他目不斜視，穿越光影幾何的空間，在日常的奔跑中，早已遺忘了那個曾緊緊抱著他的起點。這就是現代性的殘酷：我們以為向前才是成長，卻在奔走中錯過了那份原初的凝視。
這幅畫作不只是致敬藝術史中的聖母傳統，它更是一次「去神化」與「再靈化」的嘗試。它把信仰還原成母愛，把聖像轉化為記憶，把神聖放入我們每個人的童年。那朵藍花，不是天國之門，而是通往內在最柔軟處的光之漩渦。
如此看來，畫家所勾勒的，是一幅「當代聖母像」：不是教堂中高懸的畫作，而是深藏於每個人成長記憶中的「內在母親」。這樣的轉譯，使這幅畫同時擁有藝術史的回聲與當代靈魂的回望。
Running Toward the Light You Came From
By Ruòchén (July 2025)
This work continues artist TiAO’s ongoing exploration of symbolic language and inner spirituality. The composition unfolds across two visual planes: below, a modern boy strides forward, immersed in a geometric space shaped by light and shadow; above, a Madonna-and-Child-like pair emerges within a soft, blue floral vortex—part memory halo, part transcendent apparition.
This is a painting about origin and forgetting.
In this seemingly simple image, the child is mid-stride, eyes fixed ahead, with no glance backward. His gaze never touches the blue flower suspended in the air, nor is he aware that nested within it is the earliest gaze of his own life: a gentle woman cradling a naked infant—a reference to the Virgin and Child from religious tradition, but also potentially one of the many mothers of this world, or even a portrait of his own infant soul.
The floral backdrop, like a rose folded by time or a membrane of layered soul, envelops the mother and child in a near-sacred field of memory. Through this tender, remote color palette, the artist evokes a presence both irrevocably lost and deeply pervasive: maternal love—not merely of blood, but of primordial attachment and shelter.
In contrast, the boy below walks through a stark, angular space of geometry and shadow, sharply opposed to the soft, circular petals above. The upper plane suggests eternity, sacred light, and stillness; the lower, the mundane, movement, and the everyday. Yet this isn’t a binary of time, but a division of the soul’s layers—the soul always drawn toward light, while the body relentlessly moves forward.
This painting doesn’t force the viewer’s eye to settle on a single point. Instead, our vision glides naturally between the mother and child above and the boy below, crossing time and space in continual motion. The image doesn’t offer explanation; rather, it beckons us to return to a single question: Do we remember that we were once the child held tightly in someone’s arms?
What appears straightforward in structure conceals a deep dialogue between time, space, and belief. TiAO’s depiction is not merely of a child in motion or a floating holy pair, but of a visual memory stretching centuries—reaching back to the heart of the Renaissance.
The image of the mother and child resting within the vortex of petals above inevitably calls to mind Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Like Raphael’s Virgin, this Madonna faces the viewer directly, holding a naked child, suspended in an otherworldly light. But where Raphael surrounds his figures with divine clouds and cherubs, TiAO replaces them with a continuously unfolding, water-blue flower—not the symbol of heaven, but a crease in memory, the place where the soul was born.
Since the Renaissance, such mother-and-child compositions have become an icon of Western painting: the Madonna as sacred protector and emotional archetype; the infant as both God and human. We see this duality in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, and even in modernist deconstructions like Francis Bacon’s Pietà—always the tension of sacred and profane, tenderness and brutality, eternal and temporal.
TiAO, however, takes a different path. He pulls the sacred back to the human realm, placing this icon of maternity not above an altar, but above a modern boy in motion. Dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, the boy seems entirely disconnected from the hovering figures. He walks forward without looking up, through a world of geometric light and shadow—having long forgotten the gaze that once held him close. This is the cruelty of modernity: we mistake forward motion for growth, and in our rush, we lose the origin that once saw us fully.
This painting is more than a tribute to the Madonna tradition in art history. It is an act of de-sacralization and re-spiritualization. It reinterprets faith as maternal love, transforms icons into memory, and plants the sacred within each of our childhoods. The blue flower is not a gate to heaven, but a vortex of light leading to the softest part of our inner being.
In this light, what TiAO offers us is a vision of the contemporary Madonna—not a grand painting hanging in a cathedral, but the inner mother hidden in each person’s memory of becoming. Such translation gives this painting both the echo of art history and the resonance of the modern soul looking back.
