De Es Schwertberger - The Veiled Light

Publish date: 2024-05-02

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Increase Your Awareness
As you view the art above and read the art review below by Integral Life Aesthetics Editor Michael Schwartz, take notice of four primary lenses made available by integral aesthetics: the subjective/intentional space of the artist himself; the materials, medium, form and structure of the art work itself; the historical, economic and social structure in which the art work is created; and the cultural, linguistic and intersubjective values space in which the artist works and/or seeks to express.

If you would like more details, be sure to check out Michael's exquisite exploration of integral aesthetics: Looking at the Overlooked.

De Es is one the great living Visionary Artists. Integral Life will be presenting a selection of his work in two installments, one in September 2010 and the other in November 2010. Each presentation will highlight a major strain in his corpus: in November, (1) artworks meditating on the individual’s engagements with the mystery of existence; and this month’s selection, (2) profound pictorial disclosures of the forces configuring and determining manifestation.

Ranging from abstraction to figuration, this latter stream reveals the deeper orders of being and the Originary Light and Elemental Dance that brings forth such orders—artistic disclosures that are decisively philosophical (De Es’s titles are often key concept-words found in modern German philosophy, even as he does not read such texts; the titles coming forth, as he attests, directly to his inner eye). It is a philosophical art—not as illustration of philosophy; but an art that enacts philosophy in a way linguistic philosophy cannot. Philosophy, with its glorious theoretical movement, uses language to articulate generalizing concepts and categories of the way things are—whereas De Es’s art shows us directly such orderings of being; revealing the coming into being of worlds, and never in the same way twice. Art, not constricted by the universals of language (generalizations being so important for theory) is always already singular in its vision—this visual disclosure of a world, and this one, and so on—attesting to the infinite creativity of Being; and to the unbounded creativity of artist imagination.

Let’s consider one instance of this magnificent philosophical art.

Border Space is an abstract painting consisting of floating rectangles, receding into sublime luminous depths. These rectangles are like frames (cf. Border Map), their substance that of pure radiant color-Light. Translated into integral terms, they are metaphors for perspectives—perspectives, in the Integral Vision, as the primordial space or clearing in which manifestation comes forth. Here we find perspectives on perspectives on perspectives, all the way up and all the down (beyond simple relativism or absolutism). The picture field itself, as rectangle, is yet another of these bordered spaces, the depicted world of frames itself cropped by all four boundaries of the image-field: indicating that the cascade of the universe’s perspectives exceed the painting’s necessarily limited perspective: the always already partialness of any view within and on the Kosmic display.

All the paintings in this month’s gallery are singular visions of the coming forth of the orders of manifestation. Please take the time to revel in their depths, mystery, and beauty, venturing your own interpretations, so that they come to enlarge your View of the Glorious Ways of the Kosmos.

Michael Schwartz
September 2010

 

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