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Press Elen Feinberg: The Post-Modern Sublime The sublime has been a site of contestation ever since it began to preoccupy the post-religious minds of the 18th century - not least, but not entirely, as a metonymy for the God who had receded from view during the Enlightenment. The concept of aesthetic (or aestheticized) awe, articulated by Burke one way, Kant another, helped pave the way for Romanticism and Modernism both, and the concept's own metonyms - madness, the spectacle, the nano- and macro-infinitudes of inner and outer space and the para-infinitude of cyberspace - endure in the post-Modernist moment. Thank God (extant or no) they endure, as the persistence of the sublime, even if only as a historicizing trope or as an onscreen display of special effects, saves post-Modernism from its overweening cynicism and anaesthetic ennui. A post-Modernist sublime manifests in the paintings Elen Feinberg has been realizing in the last decade - interestingly enough, following the generation of landscape-oriented works whose own endless, perspective-defying spaces recalled Romantic sublime of Friedrich and Turner even the Baroque and (i.e., protosublime) vistas of Poussin and Ruysdael. The luminous depths of Feinberg's more recent canvases evince similar classical, and now-classic, sources, from Tintoretto Veronese to Tiepolo and Monet, de Chirico and Tanguy (with Turner still in there, turning pure paint into light and space) - and with a whole tradition of American landscape painting besides, from the Luminists of the Jacksonian era to the Abstract Expressionists, most especially latter-day transcendentalists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko who actively sought the sublime. And it is as the inheritrix of these painters that Feinberg makes paintings none of them quite got to paint. Feinberg has moved from suffusing the glow of the sublime - or, if you would, the sublime glow - through her landscapes to composing her scapes entirely from and with that glow. As such, her pictures have left the ground completely. They seem to have floated into the sky. If so, it is a nighttime sky, as the series title, "Nocturnes," indicates. The title also points to another artistic source for the work, beyond visual art: the first Nocturne of French Impressionist composer Claude Debussy, which he called "Nuages". And in their superbly pitched coloration and their intimations of placeless all-aroundness, Feinberg's Nocturnes do take on certain qualities we associated more readily with musical sound than with picture-making. Still, they are pictures - and they are very, very much paintings. Although they are not about virtuosity, Feinberg's canvases display superior, and often uncanny, technique. They are entirely painterly - all about the application of pigment and the nuancing of hue and tone - without evincing the labor of the hand. They brim with paint, but not with brushstrokes; shapes burgeon, but contours dissolve into one another, and into light itself. There is a sense of flowing, swirling change, but it is as much a sense of constant change, of perpetuity, as it is of variation. Things happen in Feinberg's pictures of the universe, but what these pictures really convey is the sense that such things have always happened and always will happen. This divine eternity is at once reassuring in its constancy and frightening in its vastness; small though they may be, they open up the void before our eyes. This was the void the Abstract Expressionists and their existentialist brethren so dreaded, and sought so intensely. And it is the void that became the holy grail for subsequent generations of Western artists and thinkers, moving ever closer to Eastern constructs of the Godhead admitting all the while that to seek nirvana is not to find it. In her paintings Feinberg does not seek nirvana, the merging of the individual soul into the all; she simply glimpses over the precipice at the edge of the soul, contemplating (in a classic exercise of sublime awe) the condition of beinglessness. Who knows? Beyond those radiant nebulae may be nothing but other precipices, so that the soul never achieves the free fall it most fears, and most desires. But Feinberg's meta-clouds do allude to aspects of the beyond, of the space beyond space, of time beyond time, of worlds without end. It is in these beyonds, these spaces, these worlds, that the sublime is ever present with us. And among us. - Peter Frank Los Angeles, April 2000 |