The Adesha I received from Roger Anger

I took it home and hung it next to the drawings of my grandfather, a Futurist painter of Montmartre bohemia; doing this I felt it was the most natural thing in the world, as if it had always been there. Futurism and avant-garde Roger fitted like hand in glove. An intimate reality, the collage-painting, with no name, no history – can it have any? – stood as my talisman, my anchor and spear. I had been knighted. THAT world exists, beyond space and time. This is the tale of that primeval form, familiar to me and yet unfathomable. Eons pass by; the perfect, ideal society is forever: Auroville. Anything else is an illusion. There is no death. Only Reality.

Entering the exhibition of Roger’s collage paintings, drawings, and sculptures at Citadine, I saw the genius. Those flamboyant art pieces are essential to decipher, somehow, Roger: his architecture streams from there. Not everything is on display; there is much more, caricatures, architectural sketches, buildings like pyramids and flying saucers, evanescent spirals…

Roger left the body on 15 January 2008. Two months later I displayed at the Town Hall the first and only exhibition on Roger, up to the present one. Dominique Darr had passed me her photographs of Roger’s architecture in Paris and Auroville; to these, I added four flex rolls with Roger’s drawings, like firecrackers in the sky. I was about to display a second exhibition with only these, but Aryamani wished the same and I withdrew; she never did and now I am delighted that, fifteen years later, the real exhibits are on display. Would have things turned out differently, if people had glimpses of Roger’s psyche and of that other world?

At Citadine I went around, watching over and again every single piece. None evoked the painting collage that Roger had given me, an explosion of gold, silver, and savoy blue not featured there. But when at home I took pictures of it – the camera cannot translate its secret glow – I was surprised at how different the real collage-painting looked from the one I carried within while visiting the exhibition in Citadine. I am no longer aware of its contents, how it looked like when Roger gave it to me; at home, it lies secluded in a semi-shade, beyond boundaries, ineffable... Roger gifted me an inner thing, the mirror of an inward reality, ever-changing, like clouds wandering in the sky. This is the adesha I received from him: to transform material reality into gold, silver, and savoy blue, and fly, “certain de la Victoire”.

For Roger, as for the Mother, nothing was impossible: the Avatar’s model town, sheer perfection, pure joy, exists forever. Lapis philosophorum, everyone in the crucible!