Et Ex Patre Natum

The language of the inscription Et Ex Patre Natum provides a silent, visual “soundscape” (that is, the typical sounds) of the Roman Catholic Mass as Jones would have experienced it, which in his own time (before the Second Vatican Council) was said (and sung) exclusively in Latin. The order of the lines stacked on top of each other correspond to their place sequentially in the order of the Mass as they would have been heard in the space of a church and seen on the page of a personal prayer book he used at Mass (called a “missal”). Jones visually divides the inscription with a line in the center painted in vivid red: “Per quem omnia facta sunt” (“through whom all things were made”), a confession of God as the origin and maker of all reality. Jones deliberately places different forms of the word “factus” (Latin for “made”) above and below the word “facta” in this central line, alluding to the Christian theology of the Incarnation of Christ, and, by extension, Jones’s underlying “incarnational” vision of the work of the human artist as participating in the cosmic, divine “making” of reality. The original context of the work’s creation is no longer known, but we get a glimpse into the playful and profound interchanges of Jones’s friendships in a “Christmas card” he made using a photograph of the image that he sent to his friend (and fellow Roman Catholic convert), Saunders Lewis and others.