The Lost Primarch Quest

Within his Crystal Labyrinth, the Changer of Ways worked upon the strings of fate as he planned and schemed.

For years, he had pulled the strings of fate on the 11th primarch in order to shape him into the Changer of Ways' future puppet. Since the day Kesar Dorlin first landed on Valhalla V Tzeentch had set the pieces for Kesar's fall to Chaos. It was Tzeentch who guided the 11th's incubation pod to land on Valhalla. The summoning and death of the Lord of Change was all to create a opening for corruption within Kesar despite the Primarch's resistance. The numerous encounters with chaos cults during the "Great Crusade", all to force him to learn more about chaos in a desperate attempt to fight it. Even the 11th and his legion's encounter with the Khornate MOI was all a part of the Changer of Ways grand scheme for Kesar's fall to ruin. All had gone just as planned!

Then something changed all his plans.

The strings of fate surrounding many of his plans suddenly caught fire or changed without his will to guide it. However, while Tzeentch was frustrated that some of his plans were unravelled but he was neither angered or upset. It didn't change the goal of Tzeentch's plans, simply the means in which they would be achieved. All it means is that Tzeentch needed to do what he's always done; change. Once more he began to weave the threads of fate into a new grand plan and all will go according to his design.

Already, many of the Changer of Ways' scheme were being set into motion in order to setup greater plans. Cults loyal to Tzeentch begin follow their patron's grand design with rituals and raids. Reports containing important information about cults, infrastructure, etc. were lost to the gears of bureaucracy. A ship traveling to its destination will arrive to late or off course in the middle of nowhere. Ork waaaghs were corralled towards Imperium controlled worlds of both great and lesser value as an unwitting distraction. Tzeentch smiled at his work with great pride and he watch the machinations fall like dominoes.

"All shall go just as planned."

Malcador is a foremost art connoisseur within Imperium, but it is not well known that he himself has a remarkable talent in Painting. Surrounded by several painters he always wanted to paint. But painting eluded him. Yet he tried repeatedly to master the art and there are several references to this in his early letters and reminiscence with Emperor. One of those Latter he wrote to Emperor, "You will be surprised to hear that I am sitting with a sketchbook drawing. Needless to say, the pictures are not intended for an exhibition, they cause me not the least suspicion that the national gallery of any country will suddenly decide to raise taxes to acquire them. But, just as a mother lavishes most affection on her ugliest son, so I feel secretly drawn to the very skill that comes to me least easily."

He is influenced by numerous styles, including scrimshaw by the Malanggan people of northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, Haida carvings from the Pacific Northwest region of North America, and woodcuts by the German Max Pechstein. His artist's eye for his handwriting are revealed in the simple artistic and rhythmic leitmotifs embellishing the scribbles, cross-outs, and word layouts of his manuscripts. His initial paintings of imaginary animals and birds and mask-like faces were akin to the doodles. They exist halfway between the real and the possible, the primeval and the surreal. While some of his imaginary creatures have an organic unity that suggests an anatomical probability, others have forms composed from decorative motifs as in Chinese ritual bronze vessels or ancient Peruvian carvings, and yet others have forms that break up into geometric units or bodies and are pure inventions with animation borrowed from of real animals. He achieves this largely through the creation of composite forms and cross-projections of movement or expression. Although gradually perceived reality begins to influence the formation of images the spirit of cross-projection, of knowing things by inhabiting them, continued to inform his work.

Imagination and serendipity played a greater role than planned execution in the early works and his innate sense of rhythm that structured the forms introduced an element of abstraction into his paintings. Commenting on it, he wrote: "It is the element of unpredictability in the art which seems to fascinate me strongly.… While painting, the process adopted by me is quite the reverse. First, there is the hint of a line, and then the line becomes a form. The more pronounced the form becomes the clearer becomes the picture to my conception. This creation of form is a source of wonder."

But Painting also opened him to the world of visual sensations and made him see the world anew. He wrote, 'when I turned to Paint, I at once found my place in the grand cavalcade of the visual world. Trees and plants, men, beasts, everything became vividly real in their own distinct forms. The lines and colors began revealing to me the spirit of the concrete objects in nature. There was no more need for further elucidation of their raison d'être once the artist discovered his role of a beholder pure and simple.' He also wanted the viewers to approach his paintings as they approached nature and know them through empathy and sensibility. And so he refused to name his paintings and to come between them and their viewers.

In his paintings meanings did not exist separate from form; to him, the painted image was more like nature than language and this gave it greater claim to permanence and a communicativeness that transcended cultures. Comparing the relative permanence of the arts he wrote: 'All kinds of poetic works die with language… But there is no such hassle with nature. The Krishnachura gave us Krishnachura flowers yesterday, so it does today and so it will tomorrow. Every difficulty is with language. In a way, paintings are much more enduring. The difference between what is grasped by the eyes and what is grasped by language lies in this.'

Painting awakened him to the evocative power of forms in nature and in his painting too he wanted to express through the sensory aspects forms. In this, he was in tune with the approach adopted by artists who believed in the aesthetic autonomy of mediums. The most recurring form in his paintings is the human face; his interest in it remained constant but his approach to its rendering did not remain fixed. The earliest ones are more mask-like. Some of these remind us of Peruvian or Indonesian masks, but more often they reflect an effort to turn a seen face into a social or universal type. Without any reference to the body, of which the face is a part, they usually float on the page, and like actual masks, they represent the face as a form complete in itself.

Yet within a short period, his faces begin to function as a formal synecdoche for the whole body. Etched into their lineaments are the signs of the absent body and we can see them with our mind's eye if we pay attention to the painterly, materiality of these painted faces. As his repertoire of skills grew the faces became more individualized as in portraits. Shadows of people he had seen and known began to fall across his painted faces. But for Malcador who believed that the self was always evolving and who was ever unraveling his self, portraits did not mean likeness but something deeper and truer than likeness, more akin to what writers call character. And, amalgamating the social and individual, it is in this direction that his representations of the human face finally move.

Discovering the human body was for Malcador a part of discovering nature afresh through painting. Committed to expressing himself through visual and sensuous means such as movement and gesture, Malcador kept narration out of his paintings and instead imbued his figures with a character or bhab (mood) that could be expressed formally. He gave expression to it in two different ways. He sometimes condensed the sensations or the bhab aroused by a figure into a motif, or a single iconic image. In such images, the figure assumes a denser, non-anatomical decorative shape; undergoes an expressive metamorphosis comparable to the transformation of a hand into a fist. The process remains the same even when there is more than one figure; the figures are then fused into a single motif and seen as constituting an individual biomorphic shape. And when a figure is seen in relation to an object, they are similarly amalgamated into a single entity with the object assuming human overtones.

He also sometimes transforms a group of figures into an engaging moment. In paintings conceived as a moment, he does not condense or fuse figures, but retain their discreteness and individuality; it revolves around turning the picture into a gestalt of gestures. Like other painters, while trying to free painting from literature he recognized that two or more figures brought together paved the way for painting's own kind of narration. But unlike in literature where a story is unraveled through characters developed through successive events, in painting a gestalt of gesturing figures leads us towards a theatrical moment. In these paintings where he explores the narrative and expressive potential of the body in movement and gesture. Malcador uses insights gained from theatre just as he brought a writer's sense of character into his rendering of faces. Dramatically pregnant as these moments are, their meanings are tantalizingly ambivalent; they lend themselves to partial unraveling when they are read experientially from within, but becomes intractable as soon as we try to read them according to some external code.

Art is for Malcador self-expression, or more precisely an expression of the artist's personality. Though as a painter he was no virtuoso and possessed limited representational skills, his graphic skills and rhythmic sense were commendable. He is by his own admission an artist who found rather than one who created according to a pre-defined idea but once the image surfaced the richness of thinking and imagination gained from creative work in other fields took over and guided it to its expressive finality. And if there is darkness in his paintings there is also playfulness in them and unlike the Expressionists with whom he is often compared he did not cease to feel deep empathy with nature even in his darkest moments.