Eric Aho
ESSAYS

From the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Eric Aho: Covert at DC Moore Gallery,
New York, NY, December 2011

SUBLIME FULLNESS, PERENNIAL LIGHT ERIC AHO’S PAI NTINGS
by Donald Kuspit
December 2011

Hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity…. Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime.
– Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Art is the reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorientation so that a real and significant problem may emerge.
–Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos

Immensity in the intimate domain is intensity, an intensity of being, the intensity of being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity.
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

1   TRACING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE “ABSTRACT SUBLIME,” which he thinks is the key to the “Northern Romantic Tradition” in modern painting, Robert Rosenblum notes that it begins, in the 19th century, with “daringly empty” pictures of a “boundless void,” conveying “the overwhelming, incomprehensible immensity of the universe,” and climaxes, in the 20th century, with “pictures of nothing.”4 On the one hand, there are the representational paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, in which “the dwarfing infinities of nature” are described in meticulous, excruciating detail. On the other hand, there are the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko, where pure form and color oust pictorial content while conveying “experiences of the spiritual, of the transcendental.”5 Rosenblum notes the “similarity of feeling” in the 19th and 20th century paintings, but he has little more to say about the feeling than it is “mysterious”—one of the great imponderables of subjectivity, on a par with “the great unknowables” of the universe.6 He neglects to note Wassily Kandinsky’s remark that it signals an emotional crisis—that transcendental experience is peculiarly traumatic.

Sublime feeling is disorienting, and signals “a real and significant problem,” to use Morse Peckham’s words, which is why it is “analogous to terror,” as Edmund Burke says.7 For both writers, the most real and significant of all problems is the problem of our own existence. It is the problem of existing in a cosmos greater than oneself—a vastly empty cosmos which makes one feel small and insignificant—whose infinity makes one acutely aware of one’s finite existence, which seems like an accident, a chance material event in an immaterial void. It is a cosmos in which one has no “natural right” to exist, and thus a cosmos in which one can’t help feeling insecure and unwanted. Regarding the cosmos as sublime is an ironical defense against the sense of helplessness and irrelevance its emptiness and immensity unconsciously induce in us. In Friedrich’s work human presence is reduced to a small repoussoir device, an inadequate measure of the immeasurable void, and in Rothko’s painting human presence disappears altogether, as though beside the cosmic point. Friedrich and Rothko suggest that it is impossible to feel at home in the infinite, let alone have an intimate relationship with it. The sublime puts human existence in cosmic perspective, showing that it is always problematic, a passing fancy in the eternal nothingness.

But Rosenblum neglects to note that there is a sublime fullness as well as a sublime emptiness—that there is the cosmos of living, thriving, concrete nature, standing between us and the cosmos of dead, sterile, abstract space. Nature is small and finite compared to the infinitely great cosmos, but large enough to live in, and to relate to intimately. Doing so, we recover the sense of self we lost when we become conscious of the fact that we are randomly thrown in cosmic space. We realize this in sublime experience, but we cannot tolerate the feeling of abandonment it brings with it, which is why we return to nature, feeling part of it in a way we never feel part of the greater universe. Sublime experience of the cosmos is short-lived—a sort of anxious epiphany of emptiness—but experience of nature is lifelong. We give hurricanes our names, empathically projecting ourselves into nature in acknowledgement of our kinship with as well as with our dependence on the natural world—a kinship and dependence we do not feel with the greater universe. Nature is the immediate condition of our life, and can be immediately experienced, while the greater universe seems distant and remote, however close it may seem viewed through a telescope. The stars are unchanging, the ancients thought, while the weather is always changing: nature is in constant process, while the universe as a whole seems fixed forever, at least to the naked eye.

Eric Aho is an artist of sublime fullness, as such works as English Scenery and French Wood, both 2011, make clear. It is the same living abundance of nature to which John Constable responded, expressionistically ripened by Vincent van Gogh, brought to a sort of abstract climax by Aho. He is a master of the natural sublime, but he realizes that intensely experienced nature becomes uncannily abstract, with no loss of concreteness. Aho puts the sublime back in nature, suggesting its abstract structure without denying its concrete fullness. Intensely engaged, the sense of being human disappears—there are no human figures in Aho’s work—even as nature is humanized, for one’s changing feelings seem to be mirrored abstractly in its changing light. Light is the theme of Aho’s works, and light is abstract and concrete, infinite and finite, remote and intimate at once. Its sublime presence is an antidote to the sublime absence Rosenblum thinks is the subject of Friedrich’s and Rothko’s paintings. They too are imbued with light—it engulfs Friedrich’s nature and Rothko’s colors seem to brood on it—suggesting that the universe, however ostensibly empty, is hauntingly full. Light swallows up the emptiness in their paintings, while it adds its fullness to the fullness of nature in Aho’s compositions, suggesting that they are more life-affirming—for light is life-giving—than Friedrich’s and Rothko’s paintings.

In Friedrich’s works, nature is at its wit’s end, and in Rothko’s works, there is no nature, suggesting the inner barrenness of the purely abstract sublime. Aho shows, as though in a revelation, naturally occurring fullness of being, enriched by the fullness of light—paradoxically cosmic and natural at once— affording a naturally sublime experience. It is an existential antidote to cosmic fatalism, with its selfdefeatism, and to the empty abstract sublime—it is a sublime of excess as counterpoint to a sublime of deprivation, a “responsive,” spontaneous sublime to counter a “reserved,” intellectualized sublime. It is the difference between being a participant observer in the naturally sublime and abstracting the sublime from nature and treating it as a pure idea to be contemplated through art: it is the difference between immersive empathy in nature and speculative aesthetics. By the end of the 20th century, Mark Rosenthal writes, abstraction had degenerated into a “formal exercise,”8 and as such was at an aesthetic standstill. Aho regenerates abstraction by returning to its roots in the boundless generativity of nature, and with that gives us a fresh aesthetic consciousness of it.

2   KANT DISTINGUISHED BETWEEN the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime; Aho synthesizes them. For Kant, the Alps were mathematically sublime by way of their aloof immensity; the falls at Schaffhausen were dynamically sublime by way of their rushing intensity. On the one hand, the glory of nature, on the other hand its power. Both are evident in Hike, 2010, with its mountain range and animated leaves, and above all in its painterliness—its powerful and grand gestures. And most of all in its light—with its intimate immensity, to use Gaston Bachelard’s dialectical phrase. Flickers of light become painterly flickers—the paint materializes the light, as it were, even as the light seems embedded in the paint, emanating from its colors, as though suggesting their immateriality, transcendentalizing them into “spiritual purity,” and thus suggesting their inner sublimity. Even more striking, the light is sometimes suddenly concentrated in a singular density—a density that is mathematically precise, as in the rectangular “slab” of pure white paint in the four Covert paintings, all 2010—yet, the light is often chaotically dynamic and diffuse, as in That Summer and Rural Wedding, both 2010, and Mountain Covert and Ruralist, 2011, and perhaps most dynamic in Chute, 2011, with its blindingly pure almost all-over whiteness. That work seems to hark back to Landfast and Ice Field, both 2009 (Aho painted an Ice Storm in 2011), which in turn seem to allude to Friedrich’s The Polar Sea (Wreck of the Hope), 1824, completing the circle back to the terrifying natural sublime, and giving it abstract presence. Aho studied in Finland, among other places, and lives in Vermont. His nature paintings belong, along with those of the 19th century Hudson River School and the 20th century Maine School, to the North American version of the “Northern Romantic Tradition.”

Aho’s slab of light, as I called it in the Covert series, is derived from an ink drawing by Francisco de Goya (Two Figures Pointing Towards a Bright Opening), ca.1816–19. The artist writes that it may be a “white shape on the forest floor”—a sort of luminous clearing in nature—but it stands alone, and is not exactly formless: it has an abstract autonomy and definite form however natural this shape may be. Aho continues that this slab of light “can be read as a huge passageway into (or out from) the murky reality of the nocturnal scene.” It is the “abstract unknown,” however much it has a certain representational credibility. It is an “intervention” in the darkness, an unnatural form “residing improbably within…the natural world” rather than “apart from it.” It is “altogether real,” an “object,” but it is also a Platonic form, geometrically ideal—dare one say a transcendental thing in itself? The white form may be transcendentally pure, but it is also conspicuously material—tangible, indeed, literally down to earth. There is absolute light at the top of the ladder that leads from the everyday realm of sense illusion to the intellectual realm of pure ideas, Plato wrote in the Republic—but Aho’s pure, real light is on the bottom of his picture, a sort of hypnotic resting place within its sensuous, affective excitement.

I suggest that it is the light of revelation—sacred light, eternal light, the light that unexpectedly appears in a visionary flash, a light immanent in nature that Aho extracts, distills, and idolizes into mysterious purity, suggesting that he is a visionary painter. Heavenly light has become earthbound, as it were. It has fallen to earth like an Icarian wing, but it retains its aspirational radiance. The slab of light is an intense flash in the immensity of nature, an isolated plane of natural light felt to be sublime, implying that nature is sacred—an earthly sacred space with a heavenly essence, suddenly evident in an ecstatic flash of insight. Once he sees it, Aho never lets it go—never lets it disappear back into the turbulent darkness from which it emerged. It becomes inseparable from the picture plane, where it remains on permanent display, a visionary trophy of sublime feeling, forever holding its own against the impinging darkness.

In Vow, Halloween Candy No. 2, and Kaamos, all 2010, gestural fragments of light precipitate out of natural space, not yet seamlessly converging in the broad plane of concentrated light as in the Covert paintings. The light has completely come out of hiding in them, suggesting the irony of their title. In Companion and Rural Wedding the light suffuses the scene, virtually obscuring it, whatever colorful details of it remain visible, if only as abstract flickers of paint. It is as though we are in the land of the midnight sun—the land of Aho’s Finnish ancestors. The light becomes atmosphere, the atmosphere becomes light, until there is no sense of place and time, however timely each gestural trace of the scene seems. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in Island Sunrise and Schoodic Sunrise, 2011. The change from darkness to light that sunrise marks is a disorienting moment, all the more so because, unconsciously, we are not sure whether the sun will truly rise on another day, which is why the ancient sun-worshippers helped it along with prayers.

What is startling about these paintings is that the light of the sunrise has a figural presence—reminding us that in Goya’s drawing a dark figure leans towards the luminous opening, which leans towards him, at once inviting and threatening. They are two diagonals, supporting each other even as they seem about to topple over. They form a triangle, but the triangle is unstable. The figure looks into the light, meeting it halfway, and is uncertain whether it is a way out of the hellish darkness that surrounds him and out of which his body is made—a sort of spiritual escape hatch, the entrance to the otherworld— or whether it is a deceptive trap, the ice-cold light that is the abysmal core of hell, as Dante suggests. The covert has been made overt, but does the ladder of light lead upward toward the divine or downward into the darkness of illusion?

Covert means “concealed, secret, or disguised,” the dictionary tells us, but a covert is also “a thicket giving shelter to wild animals or game,” a place in the forest where the trees are thick enough to hide them, render them invisible so that they are safe from predatory eyes. Aho paints Mountain Covert, suggesting that his wild thicket of paint has more than one meaning, even suggesting that he identifies with wild animals. This is no doubt an overstatement, but it suggests the environmental concern implicit in his paintings. No “death of nature” for him, but preservation of it in all its wildness. It also suggests that the figurative sunrise symbolizes his covert—“abstract”—presence in his paintings. His implied presence is not as murkily dark as the figure in Goya’s drawing, but then again it is rare—in the four Covert paintings— that Aho’s light is as purely white and self-contained as the light in Goya’s drawing. Aho has “seen the light,” often through a glass darkly, as it were—filtered through darkness, purifying it, but leaving gritty traces in it, and sometimes all but overwhelming it, as in the wonderfully Whistleresque Nocturne, 2011.

DONALD KUSPIT is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and was the A. D.White Professor at Large at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997. Winner of the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (1983), Kuspit is also a Contributing Editor at Artforum, Artnet Magazine, Sculpture, and Tema Celeste magazines, and the editor of Art Criticism. He holds doctorates in philosophy (University of Frankfurt) and art history (University of Michigan), as well as degrees from Columbia University, Yale University, and Pennsylvania State University. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations. An author of numerous monographs, anthologies, and essays, Kuspit has also been the editor of a series on American Art and Art Criticism for Cambridge University Press.

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