ABSTRACT
The picture illustrates the incommensurable nature of two worlds which interpenetrate but do not touch. The frightening spectacle of an apocalyptic world situation would be reduced to the personal, egocentric fear which everyone feels who nurses a secret megalomania; the fear that one's imagined grandeur will come to grief on colliding with reality. The characteristics of fire-sowing figure are all steeped in tradition, some of them conscious and biblical, some of them derived from the inherited predisposition to reproduce similar but autochthonous ideas. The artist's more or less conscious allusion to the UFO phenomenon throws light on the inner relationship between the sets of ideas. These symbolical ideas are archetypal images that are not derived from recent UFO sightings but always existed. The psychological effect is very like that of the Rorschach test, where a purely fortuitous and irrational picture appeals to the irrational powers of the imagination and brings the observer's unconscious into play.
