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The panels grew larger—144×100 cm is now the norm—and their ambitions enlarged as well. In a subjective but necessary aside, I must confess that many of these fledgling efforts don’t fly, and pictures like Spa Womb Woman and Spa Womb Man strike me as a woeful couple. Never mind that. What’s important is the fact that Raab learned from his mistakes, and learned quickly, to boot. Herman Melville claimed that an original failure always trumps an imitative success. And he ought to know. When the two most frequently cited contenders for the coveted role of The Great American Novel first saw print, both Moby Dick and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were critical and commercial disasters. Raab’s unwavering commitment to picture-making started late. So did Kandinsky’s, in his thirties, and Jean Dubuffet’s, in his mid-forties. Some of the autodidacts that Dubuffet admired picked up their brush even later than that. Morris Hirshfield blossomed in his seventies. Anna Mary Robertson (alias “Grandma”) Moses had her first show in New York City at the age of 80. (She declined to attend the exhibition, claiming that October was a busy month on the farm, and besides, she had already seen the pictures.) All of these diverse, late-blooming exemplars share one trait in common: they offer a lively blend of adult wisdom and youthful enthusiasm. Let’s call it “seasoned exuberance,” for want of a better term. For twenty-year-old painters, half a decade represents one quarter of their total life-experience. For a fifty-seven-year-old like Simon Raab, five years is less than ten percent, and that fraction diminishes with each passing second. This cold mathematical certainty encourages a heightened sense of hearing. Listen. There’s the sound of a clock ticking. As a physicist, Simon Raab understands the importance of time. As a mortal, he under- stands its value. There is an undeniable sense of urgency in these works, which are being birthed at a breakneck pace. Look deeply into anyone’s life and you’ll find Destiny at work. Seen in the overview, we can observe that parleaux’s tributaries wend their way back to the biomechanical gadgetry and the laser-linked, exquisitely precise 3D measuring devices that Simon Raab invented and marketed world- wide. In his own words, Raab explains that, “all of my implantable devices dealt with the fundamental problem of adhesion—how to bond metal and plastic in ways that must prevail in an astonishingly corrosive, saline envi- ronment: human blood. Thanks to my work as a scientist, I already under- stood how to affix acrylic to metal, permanently.” All that we see is light, a realm of dazzling and often contradictory com- plexity, and lasers manifest light in its most distilled form. And so, in our quest to understand his longtime fascination with light and the develop- ment of Raab’s parleaux, we might venture back to the artist’s adoles- cence, when he constructed a high school science project that used heli- um-neon lasers to transmit sound on beams of light. His efforts garnered an award—second place—and the hors de commerce attention of the CIA, which adapted the teenager’s concept for eavesdropping and spy-craft. This unremunerated appropriation taught Raab the value of patenting his inventions: more than seventy of them, so far, have been issued under his own name. You could say that the seeds which blossomed into parleaux were sown when Simon was a boy. Mindful of Baudelaire’s injunction that “Genius is the ability to recapture childhood at will,” let’s look in on the very young Master Simon, who was born in Toulouse, France in 1952. Eighteen months thereafter he finds himself wading—and years later fishing and canoeing— in the ponds and lakes of Ontario. Today these fond and formative memo- ries resurface in an art form that evokes the delight and childlike sense of wonder that we experience when we watch light passing through water.