'Waiting' with Hendrick Corneliz. van Vliet (1611-75)

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Now allow this occasion of “Beholding” to unfold itself to you:

“Behold”: in the pictorial opposition of the frontal picture plane of the physical painting and the oblique view of the “image” into illusory space (Nicolas of Cusa's “coincidence of opposites”?):

a corresponding relational intersection of the contradictory possibilities of public (i.e., shared) and private self-awareness ... orthodoxy and the idiosyncratic ... Catholic and Protestant spirituality ... relatively fixed “order” and changing “experience”...

“Behold” in the illusory space and the objects that occupy it in competing regular and random order:

... the contradictory wholeness of presence and absence ... fullness and emptiness ... substance and void ...

[Can you begin to see a “center of pictorial gravity?” Can you begin to hear the sound, not of quiet, but a new “silence” that contradicts all noise ... infinite music perhaps?]

Be still ... be silent ...

“Behold” in the opposition of pictorial horizontality and verticality, measured in the perceptual tension between the contained rectangle of the physical painting and the tall columns ... that soar into the vast elevation of the church walls ... and further into the invisible vaults far above the anchoring lower border of the painting and the floor we momentarily occupy:

... a “gothic” memory in the 17 th century of architectural weight and weightless ... gravity and the presence of grace ...

“Behold” in the visual tension between the relatively stable, bi-laterally symmetrical central axis of the physical painting, which is “empty” (no objects coincide with it), and the shifting, receding asymmetrical space of the “image”:

... the “illumination” for which you might have been “Waiting” ...

Has this “illumination” begun to appear to you?

Be still ... Be silent ... Be patient ...

“Behold” in the contradiction between the symmetry of the “empty,” but now luminous central axis of the painting, signaled by its “lightest light” on the right edge of the foreground column, and the asymmetrically, peripherally (hence unexpectedly) located monumental tomb of William of Nassau:

... An opening, immeasurable, but nonetheless palpable void in the middle distance of the illusory space that lies somewhere between the nearest foreground (the “central” column) and the distant background, defined by the man silhouetted in the light of the distant door (on the center axis of the picture plane ... a void between near and far ... between symmetry and asymmetry ... between light and dark ... a void that bridges all opposition and contradiction ...

Continued >>