0.2 Introduction: living with the living: entering and exiting  (Page 3/6)

Incorporating these eclectic themes, “incubation” exemplifies Wolfson’s style of poiesis. With its lyrical conjunction of above and below, melting and burning, “incubation” reads like an allegory of occluded and revealed light. Wolfson’s language forms a convergent site of incubation and excavation, concealment and exposure, evoking the flickering depths of what lies within while also providing a skeletal framework for the quickening development of emergent presence. Explicitly invoking Serapis, an Egyptian underworld god who assists in processes of spiritual ascension, the verse begins with a nominal reference to the king of the deep. Yet the interwoven patterns of the deity’s name also call to mind the realm of the serap(h)s, the angels that surround and guard the throne of heaven while weaving a living veil of light, as they plait the luminous drapery that clothes the elemental world of form.

Resonating with these poetic and spiritual associations, Wolfson’s abstract painting Night Traces (2008) is a dark, evanescent canvas that can be viewed symbolically as an overlighting veil that was woven in the interval before form takes form. In this tonally nuanced work, horizontal bands of black and white brushstrokes undulate across a visually spare surface, where they coalesce to form a monochromatic field of softly blended shades of gray that are heightened by contrasting accents of red and blue-violet. While the painting is wholly nonrepresentational, Night Traces could present an indeterminate view of nighttime darkness as glimpsed through the transparent surface of a plate-glass window, or perhaps a dissolving vision of moonlight reflected on wet city pavement. Building on an undifferentiated base of ground and sky, material surfaces and ethereal atmospheres become interchangeable. The scene discloses nothing, even as it gestures beyond the shadows of doubted forms. In the crossing of these thematic currents, the painting’s pictorial field becomes an aesthetic incubator that cradles alternating possibilities of presence and absence as it incorporates its opposite into itself. Thus in both Night Traces and “incubation,” the oyster and the pearl have become interchangeable, as their identity and their difference are simultaneously revealed and concealed in the enfolded depths of their reciprocally encrusted surfaces. As is the case throughout Wolfson’s oeuvre, such mutually intertwined associations are strung together like a strand of iridescent beads. Woven from gaping openness and secret(ed) out into the world, the artworks can be approached as veils whose underlying subjects remain at once draped and exposed, revealing as much as they conceal, so that “in darkness / we see.”

As this suggests, one of the remarkable formal characteristics of Wolfson’s oil paintings lies in their ability to convey a fragile sense of transient light, a dynamic quality that resonates thematically with the mystical capacity to embody multiple temporal and spatial locations simultaneously. Indeed, Wolfson’s canvases appear less like stable pictorial surfaces than as shimmering fields of luminous color on which forms continually crystallize, blossom, and dissolve, as shifting patterns light the paintings from within. Just as Wolfson’s artworks present these themes through a language of pictorial abstraction, they clothe their subjects in a range of sacred, angelic, erotic, and temporal associations. Coupled with ethereal titles such as Green Angel (2006), Fractured Androgyne (2006), and Inkblood (2006), Wolfson’s artworks invite their viewers to imagine the bodies of angels as painted incarnations of living light. Indeed, Wolfson’s creative and scholarly corpus can be seen symbolically as an expression of “flowering light.” This evocative image is taken directly from Wolfson’s poem “embodied naked,” This poem can be found in Elliot R. Wolfson, Pathwings: Philosophic and Poetic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and Language (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2004), p. 82. a work discussed throughout this text: