In one of the glosses in Marginalia on theology, Erik Peterson provides a remarkable pictorial image of thought of death and resurrection through the activity of washing a bowl. Peterson writes: “When washing a dirty dish, our thoughts may turn to the dead, to the dead as a genus, as an inferior genus that perhaps unconsciously influences our actions, as angels and demons do in another way. This probably happens because the dead have something in common with dirty, unclean dishes. Imagine this cleanliness however you like: perhaps we can say that death as such is an act of purification. To think of death in this way, endowed among things – like a bowl – gleam just like the voice of god in the bush” [1]. It is a fragment where Peterson comes closest to the specific nature of painting: what is painting if not the transference of muteness to the gleaming of the visible that opens before our very eyes? And like the divine voice in the bush in Exodus, what does it take to grasp and see the divine between or behind a dirty bowl as it lays on our hands? If washing a dirty dish entails receiving the dead in our thought, the passive act of painting seems always to lay a claim about the mystery of presence outside language.
If I elevate Peterson’s remarks to a terrain that the one that he intended, is connected to two Vermeer’s pictures exhibited these days at the Frick Collection gathered around the theme of “letter writing”. In both pictures there is a lady seating at a table drafting a letter – one of them has already concluded it fully attentive to the visitor on her right side; the other a maid gazes at an open window – but what is always unnerving in Vermeer’s work is the sense of the ineffable and impenetrable in the disclosure of the picture (an exposure that that is usually aided by a side curtain that welcomes us in). What is this impenetrable divinity that lurks in Vermeer picture in pure presence? Although we do not have a name for it, it is like the god that dwells in the dirty bowls or in the nocturnal bushes of Peterson’s gloss.
The painting does not speak in revealing, it only bear witness of the absolute fall of language as it becomes imperturbable in the picture. Contesting the vulgar interpretations on Vermeer’s Catholic conversion in Delft, Daniel Arasse notes that the vortex of his pictorial theology is bounded to the threshold in which images become alive (in the tradition of au vif) outside itself: “Vermeer’s painting are constructed such a way as tho render this life equally present inaccessible, near and impenetrable. What is seen is not a crete of nature observed, but a mystery within the painting itself” [2]. In Vermeer’s pictures, presence and the invisible collapse not through the inception of a metaphor of nature, but rather through the painting’s light when it casts a shadow beyond any instance of closure.
This is why in Vermeer’s paintings surfaces mandate an order of theatrical presence, while simultaneously making room for a perturbance that is forever barred from the conceptual. Unlike Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers”, Vermeer’s pictures are not endowed by the mysterious force of an alienated nature that man can measure and master; rather, the mystery resides in the whispering of the invisible that cosigns the amoris causa of the appearance of painting. If for Peterson what gleams in the dirty bowl is the cleansing of resurrection; what befalls Vermeer’s pictures can only be understood as the faith in the painterly emergence of appearance dependent on the path opened by its light.
The question of god as appearance is always posited as a challenge to the meaning of reality as totality no longer as what emerges in the open, but as what which retracts lagging behind. And we know that only appearance is seductive enough to stand for faith well beyond the fact of being visible [3]. Hence, a way to supreme subtlety of painting (picturae summa subtilitas): no longer a matter of perspective and contour, but of the mysterious indiscernibility that mounts depth between vision and the divinity of presence.
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Notes
1. Erik Peterson. “Fragmentos”, in Tratados Teológicos (Ediciones Cristiandad, 1966), 251-252.
2. Daniel Arasse. Vermeer: Faith in Painting (Princeton University Press, 1994), 75.
3. Consider Heidegger’s response to a question in the Zurich Seminar, 1951: “If I were yet to write a theology then the word ‘being’ would not be allowed to occur in it. Faith has no need of the thinking of being. If faith has recourse to it, it is already not faith. I believe that being can never be thought as the ground of God”. Séminare de Zurich (Paris, 1980), 60-61.
In the late summer of last year, the painter Baruj Salinas (1935-2024) passed away at age 89. I was saddened to learn about his death many months after, and only because I had meant to write to him about a future encounter. For over fifteen years, I had contact with this extraordinary painter, and looking back into the past, my first visit to his studio in sunny South Florida when I was only a college student has become quite vivid and unforgettable. It was a rather small and unpretentious atelier filled with some cans and areca palms, and canvases everywhere. I remember that during my first visit he showed me an illustrated commemorative Torah on the five hundredth mark of the expulsion of the Jewish from Spain, of which only a few handmade copies were made (one of them was gifted to late Pope Francis). He was a painter that carried with him, very much like Edmond Jabès, a sort of clandestine culture of the sacred Book.
In fact, the last letter that he wrote to me in April of 2022, Baruj candidly recalled his early collaboration with the Spanish poet José Ángel Valente in Tres lecciones de tinibles (La Gaya Ciencia, 1981), for which he illustrated the pages with splattered Hebrew letters in magenta. I open one of the pages to “Guimel”: “El movimiento: exilio: regreso: vertigo: el solo movimiento es la quietud” writes the poet as if describing the pictorial gesture of Baruj. A life in double exile, Baruj’s painting oscillates between movement and repose, discharge and emptiness, figuration and the uttermost disintegration of the line.
If Baruj was arrested by the clandestine culture of the Book it was also due to his interest in the possibilities of language. This is a challenge whenever we confront a picture by Baruj: how can we assert in language what the picture is enacting without falling into the allure of ornamentation or the prescription of images in Jewish art? When I wrote about his work back in 2011 this ecstatic tension seemed attractive, but now I can only see it too emphatically invested. The truth is that language betrays what the movement of his painting resists time and again. And there is no such a thing as “Jewish Art”; in fact, whenever the topic came up (during those years I had taken a course on this tradition), the painter remained unaltered and quiet, keeping silence regarding its meaning, but insisting on the expressivity of his pictures.
Baruj’s abstraction befriends the persistence of everything living and thinking. The foam-like shapes levitate towards concrete forms of withdrawal and clearing of the pictorial space. This is why his friend María Zambrano, who wrote about his work, had suggested that in Baruj’s paintings emancipate “un pensar que se hace, como se hace aqui vida en su modalidad propia que es la pintura”. In Baruj, painting is an event that coincides with an image of thought, while the image of thought, stubbornly withdrawn from mimetic representation, materializes a proximity that only painting gives the world.
It is almost as if painting allows thought to breathe – and, in breathing, becoming extension, and thus a corpus in the world. This could perhaps explain why Baruj’s recurrent pictorial obsession was the landscape seen from high above, encircled by the aura of a clouded space. As Kurt Badt observed regarding the pictures of Constable, in painting the sky is the organ of sentiment; transcending the earthy attachment of our heavy footed existence. Before language, the light of painting circumvents the invisible space where all forms will fall into place accordingly. The hand of Baruj Salinas teaches us to orient ourselves in the divinity of appearance that is only eternal because it manages to be invisible between us.
Michael Lobel’s new monograph on Van Gogh’s work, Van Gogh and the End of Nature (Yale University Press, 2024) undertakes a systematic effort, brilliantly argued and researched, at showing the redeeming visual capacities of the nineteenth century painter towards the natural world. If we call it redeeming it is because in more than one way, Van Gogh, in the last three decades of the modernizing century, was painting at the threshold of nature that soon enough was assaulted by the copious designs of modern industrialization, energy production, and the application of its effective scientific techniques over all spheres of life. It is the final culmination of the disenchantment of the world, and so also the moment of great temptations, such as standing up against it through the metaphorization of the imago naturae in one last desperate attempt at salvation through a reified ideal representation. Lobel’s art historical work shows us along the way that Van Gogh’s situation was far more complex, and that a French critic’s quip that he merely “captured nature with a soul” in his pictures requires specification and analytical comprehension within the context of the century of steam (Lobel 2).
In other words, Van Gogh is not a painter of a return to the conscience of the “Beautiful Soul” that has interiorized the exhaustion of artistic imagination; implicitly throughout Lobel’s monograph is the well grounded intuition that Van Gogh was an artist of the depth of vision without necessarily translation their specular commitment to the efficacy of realism. Immersed in his age as every artist obviously is, Van Gogh’s vision is mediated and conditioned by the effects of modernization that will severely affect the act of looking and gazing. This is not exclusively reduced to the new subject of labour production of the industrial age, although certainly there in his mining drawings, but also ecological transformations such as pollution, gaslight, geographical sites, the new chemistry of color pigments, and the tonality of human expressivity (the hues of a human face) in its new surroundings. Although there is no ambition in offering (or modifying) a theory of modernity in Lobel’s account of Van Gogh, one is reminded in the historical documentation the total and integral dimension of modernity in terms of its spatial totality: the essence of modernity was a revolution in the immanence of forms and perceptions that transcended the mere mechanization of the atmospheric designs.
Thus, when Van Gogh gazed at a peasant field and saw the isolated and orderly harvest he was simultaneously preferring the composition of the color palette of a painter that is now conscious of the material elements of his process of production (Lobel 9). But the colors return to the field, and this already provides us with a symptom of Van Gogh’s pictorial signature – which again runs implicitly throughout the book without ever coming to the forefront – about retaining the outlook towards nature and the natural world, which for the painter it becomes the enduring task to be resolved in manifold ways. But there is one way in which Van Gogh tries to tackle this drift to the infinite vanishing of nature: the capacity to move visually through space. To this end, Lobel does well to remind us that Van Gogh, perhaps more than any other artist of his time, was able to travel places thanks to the new rail system efficiently connecting regions and cities that made his work possible (Lobel 28). But besides the autobiographical standpoint, what is noteworthy is how Van Gogh trained his vision to capture industrial air pollution, trainlines, malformations of the land the end of Parisian Montmartre, and of course, the starry skies of Arles transformed by the new coal driven modern gas lamps. In all of these figural vistas, Van Gogh is always situated somewhere above the territory looking outwards, and in this way, attentive to the transformation of the exterior world; insisting whether there is any exteriority out there in the world at all (it does seem he thought there were).
Van Gogh prefigures as a painter of the eclipse of the world because it is a world in which the very notion of horizon (and thus of landscape) enters into a terminal crisis. Lobel brings to our attention Avenue de la Gare with Plane (1888) that captures this problem: here is a picture where the line of the horizon in the foreground mutates into the main PLM train line from Arles to Marseille (Lobel 33). The rail line cuts through the horizon becoming the new transcendental vector of progress; the axis of movement that carries the world forward. And yet there is something visually “earthly” in Van Gogh’s pictorial works that drives our gaze downwards; it is a symptom of its grounded vision, but also, for Lobel, of his tense relation with the temporal mobilization of modernity, as if seeking rest and detention (Lobel 43). What are the sources of this tension? Does it mean that it is never resolved? These are questions that are poorly tackled in Lobel’s book, and that remain attached strictly to art historical documentation and archival sources. But these are nonetheless fundamental questions de ayer y hoy, as the Spanish saying goes.
One could linger in the question of visual grounding in Van Gogh’s work – a perspective (although not just an optical question) that permeates his work, even when there is no outside field as a visual referent, such as the well known The Night Café (1888), where the billiard table seems to slide down towards the spectator, making the true and ultimate actor of the painting the intense and palpable wooden floor (Lobel 90). But the same could apply to the perspective of the Roi Canal or the starry skies over the Rhône, the examples abound. Is there something about vision and grounding that offers a point of entry into Van Gogh’s proposal to look into the cage of modernity one last time in order to find some non-space solace of the resting gaze? Could one argue that this “tension” – between horizontal closure and downwards grounding – his personal response to what T.J. Clark called when analyzing Pissarro, the “ongoing vileness of our epoch of transition”? [1]. It is hard to tell because, unlike Pissarro, Lobel tells us nothing about Van Gogh’s political views.
However, we do know that at a young age Van Gogh wanted to pursue theological studies that he soon gave up for visual arts (Lobel 74). Could it be that his insistence towards the ground is resolutely theological, as if he wanted to retain the god of place (theos aisthetos) as the ungraspable region for extraction and production, the new axiological order of the industrial age? Lobel’s does well to cite Victor Hugo at the beginning of the second chapter “Earth” about the outskirts quarries and sewages of Montmartre: “a variety of those misshapen fungi from the underside of civilization” (Lobel 68). It all seems that even when he was not attending to capture the limits of Montmartre, the fields of Arles, or the domestic spaces, Van Gogh’s provokes a downward descension into the ground that invites any participating space. Looking at the vanishing world one last time needs a ground from which to stand and retain a sensible distance; that very distance that the nascent bourgeois world will effectively dissolve giving up on the cohabitation between life and nature into generic and massive alienation.
The question of the ground perspective is also corroborated by Van Gogh’s interest in strong and emphatic hues for his picture, learning from the previous generation of artists that “all the colors that Impressionism has made fashionable are unstable” (Lobel 149). In other words, the effect of color for the Impressionists, including Seurat and Pissarro, is too dialectical, which means that the tension evolving from the ground is immediately resolved between color and form, the orderly and the interdependence of the composition for stable appearance. This allows us to consider that one of Van Gogh’s key signatures – his almost bombastic and expressive use of colors – have something intimate, and perhaps also secret, to the spatial-temporal closure of modernity and its contingencies. I do accept Lobel’s suggestion that Van Gogh seized the opportunity of new industrial non-natural hues in order to mitigate the coming lackluster world oriented towards production, extraction, and human survival. For Van Gogh color becomes the barrister to gaze firmly upon the fleeting temporization of the highly visible and transparent world of disenchantment and total organization.
But to say color is also an artifice or short for the insistence on light, which is not the light of the new immanent world, but certainly a painterly light that transcends immanence by insisting on the irrevocable character of places, arrangements, inhabitation, and contingency of phenomena. This is painting at its best against the vile epoch of transition, that has extended itself as the transition of the end of the modern epoch into our present. The ruins of Van Gogh’s industrial materials allow Michael Lobel to come full circle about Van Gogh’s inscription in the modern age (Lobel 153). But we should not let go of the idea that while materials do decompose and rot, the painter’s ultimate material utensil is nothing but light, and this means “a thinking of light, an image that is aware of the relation that light has with things. This matter is equally concrete”, as Monica Ferrando has recently advised [2]. Is not the descending lux the sensorial condition for disclosing the gradual proximity between vision and ground? It is with this exterior lighting as pictorial praxis that Van Gogh stood as a madman and a witness to the endless night of our disappearing our world.
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Notes
1. T.J. Clark. “We Field-Women”, Farewell to an idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999), 109.
2. Monica Ferrando. “From History to Anarchy: The Painting of Louis Comtois in the Thought of Reiner Schürmann”, Philosophy Today, Vol.68, Fall 2024, 875.
Infrapolitical Reflections 