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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