0.11 Erasing inscription, inscripting erasure: palimpsest  (Page 2/2)

When one gazes at its scraped and brushed surface, the painting appears not only as a monolithic dark field or impenetrable void, but as an intricate fabric or veil whose shifting, interwoven patterns are reminiscent of a piece of antique lace. Following the embedded patterns of the palimpsest, the surface of the canvas displays underlying forms that could evoke the outlines of an ancient etching, or perhaps a parchment displaying the ghosts of antique cityscapes, or the whispered silhouettes of figures that might have appeared in illuminated manuscript decorations or as the cartoon designs for stained glass windows. Throughout the painting, (in)visible forms remain highly unstable, constantly changing their internal configurations through an ongoing play of recession and emergence.

As this suggests, abstract painting represents an especially powerful site for creating such presences that are absences, and absences that are presences. When constructing an abstract image, a single brushstroke simultaneously entails the articulation of the image and the eradication of the image. The inscription of the paint mark is thus a gesture of erasure, just as this erasure is itself a mark of inscription. In this way, the abstract paint mark is at once iconic and iconoclastic, and in this (non)dual state, the artwork lies suspended in a dialogical space of “image and imagelessness.” Or, to adopt Wolfson’s kabbalistic turn of phrase, abstract painting’s dynamic visualization of the formlessness of forms can be seen as a pictorial translation of “innumerable forms of formlessness” that can represent “the garments by which the unseen is manifest in the hiddenness of its disclosure.” See Elliot R. Wolfson, “New Jerusalem Glowing: Songs and Poems of Leonard Cohen in a Kabbalistic Key,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 15 (2006), pp. 121-22.

Another way to envision these contemplative arrangements is to imagine light falling through a lace curtain as it projects a shadow onto a background wall. Or, depending on where you happen to be standing and what you are holding in your hands, the openwork patterns of the lace may fall onto the surface of your own body, or onto a blank canvas or sheet of paper. In all instances, the cuts in the fabric correspond to the absence that allows for an evanescent play of light. Imagine then that the curtain moves softly as a breeze blows through an open window. The designs shift on the breath of the air current, just as the open frames of the lace become like the ellipses of an unfinished sentence, a space where light draws breath, and radiance takes shape in the darkness. Immersed in this aerial flow, you see the shifting patterns of light simultaneously designing and dissolving the language of an unwritten text.

Just as Palimpsest displays a painterly field in which vision appears to be “scraped again” to reveal the absent presences of what came before, the canvas also echoes what never came to be. Like the shifting light through the lace curtain, the emergent vision is the obverse of what is seen: ascending from the traces of its own erasure, the fragmented images embody the imprint of what was always, and never, left behind. In Language, Eros, Being , Wolfson similarly comments on the notion of the palimpsest in the natural world when he observes that “we can speak hyperliterally of the cosmos as the book of nature, that is, nature as the palimpsest on which the erasure of the ineffable is erased in the inscripted traces of what appears, apparently, as real.” Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 8. Or, as Wolfson writes elsewhere regarding “the no-showing that is the spectacle of mystical vision,” such as in the ineffable name, “The originary text is a palimpsest from its inceptual inscripting/erasure—the multiple readings etched on its surface constitute the writing-over, the spectrality of the invisible emerging from beneath the layers of the visible, the disclosure of truth in the concealment of image through the concealment of truth in the disclosure of image.” See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Structure, Innovation, and Diremptive Temporality: The Use of Models to Study Continuity and Discontinuity in Kabbalistic Tradition,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 6 (Winter 2007), esp. p. 149. Threading through the chiasmic loops of the palimpsest, the viewer is left gazing at the presence of absence through an erasure that is the sign of its own creation.

As this suggests, the complex visual dynamics displayed within this physically diminutive yet conceptually powerful painting are profoundly apophatic, as writing and unwriting, painting and unpainting, are figured not as oppositional states but as distinctive aspects of a singular form of creative expression. In the ambivalent mark-making that comprises Wolfson’s painterly facture, the removal of pigment enables a revelation of the underlying traces of what came before, which subsequently reveal themselves as formative aspects of what is (not). Thus resonating with alchemical and kabbalistic symbolism, Palimpsest encodes the mystery of unmarking in the visible language of the mark. In so doing, the abstract structures of the painting can be seen as an invisible reflection of “prayertrace,” “prayertrace” is published in Footdreams and Treetales , pp. 55-56. an apophatic poem that makes its mark while covering its tracks:

to walk

without trace

to speak

without voice

to hold

without grasp

to be done

in the undone

to be seen

in the unseen

to be born

in the unborn

this,

my will,

fulfill

o mother,

hollow be your name,

overflowing

knowing

the unknowing

my lips leap

to empty

emptiness

to break

brokenness

to hope

hopelessness

Much like the painting of a palimpsest, in this lyrical poem of erasure—itself a structural inversion of The Lord’s Prayer—the reader encounters an entreaty to emptiness that seeks to attain a state of overflowing plentitude. In their abstractness, both the painting and the poem reflect a desire “to be seen / in the unseen,” a vision that emerges through its own erasure—much like the ecliptical intervals and hollow depths that distinguish painterly alchemy and poetic utterance.