A landscape without orientation, A journey into the stars, black holes, and the vast expanse of the cosmos. Thick coalescing paint like dried blood and iron of war. The epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the tale of Gilgamesh. The stories told of humanity in its past, present, and the future. Of both void and presence.

These are the thoughts, questions, and feelings that arise when I look at Isaac Aden’s paintings, currently on display at the David Richard Gallery. What was the artist trying to say and express by making these massive paintings that represent the void, the formless shapes of gases and nebula, and densely spray-painted colors of emotions and feelings? Why did the artist title his show the “Numinous Sublime,” which is a term coined by the philosopher, theologian and comparative religionist. Rudolf Otto?

Otto is considered one of the most significant scholars of religion in the early twentieth century. According to Otto, numinous is a deeply personal and profound emotional experience which he posited was at the center of the world’s religions. On the other hand, sublime is the experience attributed to landscapes that may appear terrifying, such as the mountains and the wilderness coupled with an impending sense of danger or insignificance in the wake of overwhelming forces. Is there any instance where the numinous and the sublime can merge? Or an instance where a numinous kind of sublime can emerge via the experience of painting?

I believe that, in the case of the numinous sublime, the viewer experiences a particular kind of sublime that is wrought with spiritual overtones or profound personal meaning often contending with great beauty, qualities of infinity and our own finite smallness in relation to that infinite beauty. In the particular case of Aden’s paintings, we perceive infinity spatially in terms of the void that extends infinitely into the center of the canvas and off of the edges of the canvas. This infinity can be beautiful because infinity is something that humans cannot easily grasp without the power of reason to summarize its incomprehensible qualities. It is in essence a type of beauty itself that one never tires of gazing into because of its ungraspable and incomprehensible qualities.

In terms of technique, the paintings form through endless repetition of aerosolizing and scattering of spray paint on the canvas to control the overall color in terms of temperature (whether the color is warm or cool) and saturation (whether the color is intense or more muted). The dots, which share the visual qualities of pointillism or the pixels in an image taken by a digital camera, dissolve into a continuous vision when seen from a distance and become apparent again when the viewer gets closer. It could be argued that Aden’s paintings are simultaneously in dialog with both pointillism and the discrete qualities of a digital photograph, as well as a modern computer display, which contains so many pixels that the image acquires the illusion of continuity when seen from a distance or zoomed out. One could consider them an example of post-minimal pointillism.

The composition appears empty like a hollow void, but the painting is densely filled with gases of nebulae, dust, and particles. The colors feel heavy due to their relative darkness and intricacy in how they are balanced and harmonized, with the use of muted and saturated colors. A sense of light can be felt that defines the gaseous forms, as well as spatial depth due to the warm and the coolness of colors, as well their values in terms of luminosity. The paintings are absolutely huge, piercing into the ceiling and overwhelming the viewer with a surrounding experience of a monumental landscape painting.

When I visited Aden’s home, I saw numerous paintings of antiquity on the walls, which indicated that the artist is deeply rooted in the tradition of western painting, and his work a continuation of that tradition. Mostly landscapes, the paintings contained the spirits of the masters of a bygone era, just as a teacher would communicate with the voices of the deceased in the continuity of meaningful encounters made across and teachings passed down the generations.

Aden points to a portion of Otto’s text that greatly energized him to make these formless landscapes in the pursuit of the numinous sublime:

“In great Art the point is reached at which we may no longer speak of ‘magical”, but rather are confronted with the numinous itself, with all its impelling motive power, transcending reason, expressed in sweeping lines of rhythm. In no art, perhaps is this more fully realized than in the great landscape painting of China in the classic period of the Tang and Sung dynasties. It has been said of this great art: ‘These works are to be classed with the profoundest and sublimest of the creations of human art. The spectator who, as it were immerses himself in them feels behind these waters, clouds, and mountains the mysterious breath of the primeval Tao, the pulse of the innermost being. Many a mystery lies half-concealed and half-revealed in these pictures. They contain the knowledge of “nothingness” and the “void” of the “Tao” of heaven and earth which is also the Tao of human heart. And so, despite perceptual agitation, they seem as remotely distant and as profoundly calm as though they drew secret breath at the bottom of the sea”2

Taoism is the religious philosophy originating from China that spawned the popular idea of yin and yang. 3 Taoists believe that qi, or energy, comprises everything in the universe and follows the way, which is the Tao. 3 According to their teachings, Tao was the silent void at the beginning of the universe, giving birth to the binary structure of the universe as the yin and yang.3

Analogies can be made to the explanations of the cosmos found in western sciences and the Judeo-Christian religion that energy and matter are convertible and ultimately the same, and that at the beginning there was the word. Thus, It is then not coincidental that Rudolf Otto would find something of substance in Taoism and the Taoist paintings.


Both the eastern and the western metaphysical positions contend with the sense of infinity. Both deal with the fundamental nature of reality and the cosmos. Then how does Aden reference or utilize the teachings of the Taoist landscape paintings that Otto praises with great respect and admiration?

A Taoist painting of a mountain-scape, a cityscape, or other types of landscapes appear to depict certain things, such as mountains, hills, rivers, pagodas, walls, shrines, and so on. However, in the paintings, the forms repeat endlessly, suggesting that these forms and the kind of world that the painting constructs continues on and on endlessly off the edges of the painting. Through endless repetition and variation, a space that is infinite is constructed. This isometric conception of infinite space compares with the western mode of spatial depth and perspective that primarily began in the Renaissance, with the camera-like capturing of infinite distance being captured in the vanishing point of the perspective system.

Conversely, in his categorization of the sublime as mathematically sublime and dynamically sublime, Immanuel Kant (most widely known for his discourse defining the sublime in the western traditions) emphasized the supremacy of reason over other human faculties.4 In the case of mathematically sublime, Kant argued reason allows us to understand the infinitely large nature of the landscape in its totality that imagination fails to do; Kant described the dynamically sublime as the feeling of being in a safe position despite the fearful nature of the landscape.4 In the case of Aden’s work, both the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime are at work: the viewer utilizes reason (rather than imagination) to understand the vast, infinite nature of the landscape, which simultaneously makes us afraid because we humans are small and finite in comparison.

Intriguingly, Aden’s landscapes remove all references to the nationality of the geography. Landscapes are always claimed by specific interests, to or against which we align our political and individual identities and allegiances. Even lands that are terra nullius (meaning ‘land belonging to no one’) or outer worlds not yet claimed by a nation from Earth cannot typically be seen or experienced with disinterestedness if we swear allegiance to a nation state. It is because we have in our basic human nature the urge to make unclaimed lands ours. And people who identify with the western historical narrative of exploration and expansion will view the landscape with biases that are sympathetic to the colonizer’s psyche.

By removing the geographic markers and references to the specific nationality of the landscape, I would argue that Aden denies the colonizer’s view of the landscape, despite his lack of interest in the concept of disinterestedness as a painter. In his paintings, the land becomes ethereal like the sky or fluid like the water. All the demarcations and markers of political, social, economic, and cultural significance are removed. The geological history and the geographical specificity are absent. We are no longer asking if the land belongs to Canada or Mexico. Our view of the land is no longer filtered by the Eurocentric view that the West is at the center and everything else is in the periphery. What remains is a particular kind of spiritual vision of the landscape that appears Color Field or Suprematist in the overall concept and Post-Minimalist Pointillist in the close observation. This detailed view reveals technical precision and aspect of their execution. The viewer is then allowed to experience the landscape for what it is - a vast and infinitely large expanse of space that continues into the center of and off the edge of the canvas. Aden’s painting provides a vision for a conception of infinity and infinite space that is both isometric and 3-dimensional Euclidean, both eastern and western. we must applaud Aden for his valiant effort at creating these large, powerful paintings that strike the viewer with awe and truthfulness, in his goal to create spirituallandscapes that express the numinous sublime.

1 Wainwright, William J. “Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937),” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967 (bibliography updated in 2005 by Christian B. Miller). https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/otto-rudolf-1869-1937 2 Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy, Oxford University Press, 1924, London, pp69, (cited within: Fischer, Otto, Chinese Landscape Painting, Das Kunstblatt, Jan 1920.) 3 Little, Stephen. Taoism and the Arts of China, The Art Institute of Chicago (in association with the University of California Press), 2000, pp. 13-14 4 Ginsborg, Hannah. “Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/ 5 Carlson, Allen. “Environmental Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/environmental-aesthetics/ 6 Khan, Fouad. “Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation: We must never doubt Elon Musk again,” Scientific American, 2021. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-we-live-in-a-simulation/

Associated Artist

• Isaac Aden

Associated Exhibitions

• Isaac Aden The Numinous Sublime - Part II
  
  September 5, 2023 - October 7, 2023
  MORE INFO

Associated News

• September 10, 2023
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• September 6, 2023
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• September 5, 2023
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  September 5, 2023
  


• September 3, 2023
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• July 24, 2023
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• July 24, 2023
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• February 2, 2022
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• May 15, 2021
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• March 20, 2021
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• March 16, 2021
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• October 28, 2020
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• September 23, 2020
  Isaac Aden: Vespers and Auroras
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  September 23, 2020
  


• September 8, 2020
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  September 8, 2020
  


• August 21, 2020
  Press Release - Isaac Aden - Vespers and Auroras