0.18 Saying his own unsaying: passion

image --> Reverberating depths cut a dense path through Wolfson’s symbolic self-portrait, Passion (2004). The twisting lines of this elusive, monochromatic canvas resemble the calligraphic structures of Zen brush painting, just as they present a twist on the theme of sacrifice in Christian martyrdom. This black and white painting is signed in red in the lower-right corner; as Wolfson says, the image is symbolically signed in blood. According to the artist, with the sole exception of a white patch at the center of the canvas, this work was painted in a single brushstroke, beginning at the center and radiating outward. The variety of texture displayed in this meandering line conveys the expressive multiplicity that lies embedded within a single ribbon of paint.

While highly abstract, the painting evokes a striding figure who appears in profile, wearing a dark suit and hat. The crown of the hat is the densest area of the composition, just as this tonal concentration of black represents the starting point of the painting. This area remains the most centered and concentrated spot in a compositional swirl of calculated instability. While the self-portrait appears as an unreadable tableau formed by illegible calligraphy, the image is also reminiscent of Marc Chagall’s figure of the wandering scribe, which appears on the cover of Wolfson’s book, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism . Just as Venturing Beyond and Passion can be seen as Wolfson’s “signature pieces,” the artist himself has affirmed, “I think that all my work, even the work intensely focused on Jewish mysticism, is a venturing beyond.” Elliot R. Wolfson, in correspondence with the author, August 22, 2006.

In this apophatic self-portrait, the striding figure is formed from the same brushstroke as the impenetrable morass of the environment he inhabits. This densely chaotic tangle of forms evokes the poignant concluding line of “flashing seal/seventh palace”: “i have come to walk / but, alas, there is no path.” That is, there is no path, precisely because everything is the path, hence nothing is. Formally and philosophically, the painting’s extensive “white space” thus evokes the blankness of the via negativa . This paradoxical state conveys not only central themes of Christian and Jewish mysticism, but the Zen notion of “the path that is no-path [that] encompasses manifold paths.” Wolfson, “New Jerusalem Glowing,” p. 112. Walking through this unwalkable canvas, it is impossible to know where the figure leaves off and the ground begins. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has written extensively on the subject of humans existing in a state of corporeal interwovenness with their environments. Merleau-Ponty has eloquently observed that the body and the space it occupies are not two distinct entities: “The analysis of bodily space has led us to results which may be generalized. We notice for the first time, with regard to our own body, what is true of all perceived things: that the perception of space and the perception of the thing, the spatiality of the thing and its being as a thing are not two distinct problems.” Thus “the experience of our own body teaches us to embed space in existence,” just as the movements of the body in space are “comparable to a work of art…[and appear as]a nexus of living meanings.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 148, 151. Just as the figure blends into the abstract visual field that he inhabits, the field merges with the figure, forming a coincidentia oppositorum that simultaneously asserts and obliterates the distinctions between subject and object, figure and ground, fusing the two into a state of unified disjuncture and disjunctive unity. Passion thus appears as an abstract portrait of a path-breaker, a visionary who treads ancient ground and who, through his continuities and divergences with established interpretive patterns, breaks old paths in order to break new ones.