Concealment and Configuration - A Meditation

Concealment and Configuration: A Meditation

I move beyond sensuous apprehension to investigate the work outside the seeing. A downward gathering to the roots of human response to seek what it is that receives its directive. What releases itself toward me. Its bringing forth. I stand at attention at the ripening of the work that is none other than my maturing self. In the warehouse of existence both niche and goal.

I bestow the presence of configuration as the physicality of its appearance. I infer its concealment by what does not show. If I think about where representation begins and ends and what that means to the essential unity, I split the composition up into multiple elements or attributes of smaller frames. Or with a whole vision see what I want to see or able to see. With the same gaze that I watch the rain from my window falling in pools which make this odd planet shine.

You should know this: configurations change the way I see myself and the world.

But it is Concealment or Absence that is the Progenitrix of Things Present, of Appearance, and therefore of Existence.

The Aleph in Borges’ story of the same name has the expansiveness of all things in space and time, hidden and disclosed, existing simultaneously as linen for the burn of living. Noticing and reflecting on matter, space and its contents, color and the residue of emotion, the painting too is the bearer of traits that have the distinctiveness of deeper origins not delimited by its own peculiarities.

Paintings that open by themselves, tower within themselves, seed-occurring worlds that abide by the force of their creation. They are fully tangible and can be rediscovered at any time during the process of making. The reciprocity of sheltering concealment and self-disclosing configuration occur without reason.

Lost in the geography of the mind is the dark rose of self-awareness. In unheard locutions it recognizes all realities as symbolic and metaphorical, thereby sparing me from self-deception and literalism. Despite evasions that I exist.

Concealment is the hiddenness or absence not simply of this and that but of the imaginal. In the last horizontal clarity of the moment a great unseen current comes about from its hiddenness letting vast horizons swell within me.

Standing on the doorstep of the unconcealed, transition gives way to transit, accelerates in the process of painting. Crossing the threshold which now is an opening there is a clearing where concealment and configuration are waves and currents of the same ocean. Today and the day before yesterday, mirror and moment, atoms and faces, double ply but nondual I am illuminated and perforated.

Concealment is the unseen gathering whereas configuration is the coming-into. Concealment is shelter. It protects, secludes until the right time of disclosure. It is a lodging, abode, or dwelling not yet a home. Releasing the swirl and liquid configured into appearance, it has a depth of far meaning, subliminal and impactful. Unlike idioms and phrases that contain hidden meanings and have outlived their circumstances, the concealed in painting is like an underlip aflame when seen against the light.

Concealment has an undertone and subcurrent. An inscape of flowing. In eye-taking clusters multilayered, off-beat and accidented. Silent and sharply played like the swath of the scythe, I give it to the stars then to the arched earth of my longing. Without cease it is imaged into its own reality.

It has no tie beams that can be seen until it becomes configuration. Absence is not recognized until it appears as Presence. Yet configuration can disappear to uncover yet another level of configuration. I surrender to the new paradigm. Die into one version of reality, and in the delirium of uselessness, re-enter into another.

I do not know what I am working towards. There has to be an open state, a coherent whole. An awareness that the underlying or essential creation is the foundation-existence of the painting. And temporary content will be replaced by deeper structures and meaning. I have faith: the hidden will be disclosed in my insularity. When configurations are separated enough from their hiddenness, enough to coalesce (coagulate in alchemical terms) into their actual forms and patterns, there will be a release of energy as if a great fire passed through them.

It is not my will-to-power or pretense that breathes heavily that is the engine of my suffocation. It is the releasement of everything I know or long for, burning like a hot coal against the corner of my mouth. To let the painting be what it is. To tear away the icy phosphorus from fingers and open blind eyes to that which owns no existence in itself but has the properties of theophanies.

Configurations are arrangements, designs, layouts , geographies, organizations and order, all things unveiled, unconcealed, not withheld. Relationships are defined by elements of composition in particular forms, figures, or combinations, colors and patterns made for specific purposes. Relative dispositions or parts of a puzzle, perhaps. Mind-puzzles, soul-puzzles. Puzzles of the psyche.

Configurations not calculations. Not approached through rules or principles. Nothing is regulated or guided by it. What only sweeps me away in the semblance of an event coterminous in time and space is the continuous experience of the flux of painting. Movements that speak to the heart through the eyes. A certain habitus, morphology, subjectivity, and stylization typical of the act. The delirious brushwork, ciphers of umbilical negation that thrive on the extreme, tested at the edges.

There are many ways configurations might be interpreted. I see them differently depending on what I know, have been taught, listened to, or read. But this stymies real communication, real discovery of meaning. It is the deeper not knowing that is the readiness for uncertainty with its own peculiarities of meaning. Devoid of logic and literalism, I exhale without conclusion.

Configuration arrives, crosses the divide of technique and aesthetic wonder. It brings with it the shimmering nakedness of necessity, chance, the lapsus of incompetence, crests of contrast, clumps of impulse, the cries of swellings and contractions of paint. This is, however, not a static presence nor mere duration but a process of coming into the present, placing itself into the open. Consider the way it gathers, what is dispersed into a unity as to be present (and subject to change again), the before and after all the diversions, the finality of timeliness.

Where it becomes an event is at its beginning. Unfolding its essence with each look, ever emerging and re-emerging until the whole generalizes its parts. From counterfeit-images and faux resolutions, there is an array of echo-remains desperate for completeness. Desperate for an essentialist level to line up, root relationships to be counted where each configuration is born from the augury of cadenced brushwork advancing like the high tide. Configurations not as symbols but as things-as-themselves. Coherent and dissonant resonating with the sound of a peculiar dialectic in space. A multiplication of substance occasioned by the slightest thought. For each one there seems a set limit, a place. But only to be reworked or appended. Since they cannot subdivide like single-celled animals or move about by extending fingerlike projections, they cannot separate themselves. They can, in their immobility and fabricated triumph, appear to point and direct, to wait like saints and angels.

Art-speak is an occularcentric language. It privileges sight, the visual faculties. Shifting eyes back and forth, here to there, is suprasomatic, depth-inducing, wildly seducing, ever produced in the most unpredictable fashion. Where the inner necessity in being steadfast can recognize absence as the gift of the painter that brings presence to the work. To take concealment as it unfolds and release it into an open region fit for spontaneous configuring.

Each work includes its own criticisms, explanations, and questions. Each configuration has a particular nature. I assume that what it is, is the way it must be. Once the configuration is “annunciated” it must not change or take on another unless there is the persistence of seeing it as clumsy, devoid of spirit.

All configurations have the chance of deliverance. They have form, color, texture, emotionality, ways of moving, pointing, or presenting themselves. If I maintain a soft gaze (soft consciousness) they set up before the eyes. If I allow them to collect in all their diversity, change, and interact as material existence, I find a recognizable pairing of concealment and configuration when I stop thinking. When I am not resistant to change. The painting carries its own message because it has developed its own language (or frequency) lurking below the surface of conventional meaning. A suitability that goes beyond their somethingness.