0.4 The epiphany of the (in)visible: texture and epiphany

image --> The highly textured surfaces of Wolfson’s canvases can be viewed imaginatively as complex fabrics whose interwoven threads form anuanced language readable on multiple levels simultaneously. One way to approach this interpretive task is to view the paintings as a visual paradox, asdiaphanous surfaces showcasing an epiphany of the (im)possible. Despite their differences in meaning, both terms—diaphanous and epiphany—share a common root, phainein , which means “to show.” Examining the terms more closely, it becomes evident that their significant distinctions lie in theirprefixes, which designate the location of the appearance, or the site of the showing. While “epi” connotes a sense of proximity that lies on, at, or near thesurface, “dia” suggests a fluid movement that extends through or across space, so that transparent outer textures reveal a delicate sense of veiledinteriority. Significantly, the prefix dia also connotes the principle of relationship, as in the words dia-lectic and dia-gnosis, whichrespectively convey the ideas of conversing with and knowing through.

These themes are vividly expressed in Wolfson’s painting Epiphany (2008), an abstract canvas that evokes a conflagration of flowers or a diaphanous bouquet of flames. In this work,radiant surges of yellow, red, pink, orange, and white are chromatically tempered by wisps of green, while the image is further deepened and heightenedby concentrated patches of blue. Through this play of overlighting colors and underlying forms, Epiphany simultaneously evokes and inverts the realms of above and below, of illuminated depths and dynamicsurfaces. The title expresses a corresponding sense of epiphany, a transient moment when illumination surges forth in flashes and waves, as a surfacing toconsciousness becomes visibly expressed on the surface of the canvas.

While Epiphany expresses these themes in distinctive pictorial terms, Wolfson’s painting Texture #2 (2005) also conjoins and collapses layers of opacity and transparency, surface and depth. Painted in a warm spectral palette, Texture #2 displays a mosaic-like pattern of red, orange, and yellow tones that are sparsely intermixed with deep patches of violet. Inthis abstract canvas, blocky clusters of orange brushstrokes appear to melt and glow like embers in an open hearth. If these combustible energies wereexponentially multiplied and dramatically released, the visual effect might resemble the incinerated swirls that form Conflagration (2007), the volatile image that now hangs so quietly in a private home.

Gazing into the fictive flames of Texture #2 , the impastoed edges of brushstrokes appear as the broken characters of an unwritten language, an unscripted script that forms a luminousveil. The blocky golden brushstrokes along the painting’s perimeter resemble a flickering frame that loosely encircles the painting’s radiant inner reddishcore; in so doing, this open halo evokes the abstract presence of an angel in aByzantine fresco or mosaic. If viewers were to imagine such a luminous figure, then consciously release the image from their minds, they would be holding ontothe angel while simultaneously letting it go. Etheric traces of spiraling light could then imaginatively appear as the invisible equivalent of the aniconicicon.