Diptych on Invisible Light

When I first saw Aldemar’s paintings, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to write a book of essays on several of his individual works, which would explore what appeared to be a recurring theme in all his paintings: the theme of invisible light! On that occasion, I even gave titles to some of these imaginary texts: “Phenomenology of Light”; “Blue Tower”; “Sun from the Fence”, and “Sea of Light”…

The title “Diptych on Invisible Light” came to me in front of one of those paintings, and it refers to invisible light on two levels: 1) as a constant throughout the entire poetics of Aldemar’s painting; and 2) as his concretely realised artistic accomplishment.

All alchemy seeks stone and water: the stone of wisdom, also known as the Philosopher’s Stone, which is meant to make possible the transmutation of lead into gold; and the Water of Eternal Youth, which will make us eternal and thus preserve the meaning of life. Aldemar knows this, yet for his painterly aims, all of that is still too coarse, too bound to substance, almost too earthbound; there is still too little of the spiritual in it, and it remains too far from the quintessential, which is the ultimate goal of all artists! The painter Aldemar does not seek two principles; he does not have two goals. Aldemar strives towards the One, for the One is itself the very foundation and essence of the world!

Alchemy reduced the world to two principles: matter and life. Aldemar’s painting is alchemy distilled, in which the final and most difficult step of synthesis, reduction, union, and unification has been completed: the world has been reduced to its true foundation, to a single principle. For both matter and life are, in ultima linea, merely manifestations—or more precisely, emanations—of a single principle, the true basis of the world in the entire palette of its immeasurably rich diversity: the principle of light!

The effects of that alchemical feat are visible in every one of his paintings. Aldemar’s paintings are artistic testimonies, visual proofs of the metaphysical and alchemical transformation of invisible light, presented through pictorially realised scenes of the visible world and expressed with an aesthetically masterful suggestiveness that leaves one breathless and has remained unparalleled since Gauguin’s pictorial reports on the invisible light of Tahiti. The strangeness— or rather, the uniqueness—of each of Aldemar’s paintings unequivocally confirms that these works were realised according to a recipe known only to him; or perhaps not even known to him, but only briefly bestowed upon him, whispered to him in moments of ecstasy, as he transforms invisible light into the visible world in moments of creative inspiration.

Every morning, for several days now, I have spent a long time gazing at one of Aldemar’s paintings. Suddenly, as if in a dream, a city appears before me; I startle and realise that everything I had seen until then had been an apparition, and that I had in fact only been dreaming of all those cities I had mistakenly believed I had seen while awake. This city in the painting is different from all the cities I have seen and, in some elusive yet unmistakable respect, feels truer than any of them!

Tall edifices, flat walls, broad planes—shadow and umber, and ultramarine; the colours of the earth and the colours of the sky. It is dark, and yet some inextinguishable light pours into this city from everywhere. On these edifices, which are at once buildings and houses, for they combine the monumentality of buildings with the intimacy of family houses, there appears here and there a window or two. No more than fifteen or so; not enough for the façade surfaces on such vast edifices. This brings to mind Sartre and his scenography for the play Huis Clos (No Exit): the total absence of windows, the heightened feeling of panic—not of the enclosed, but of open space; man degraded to a snail shut in his shell, built from the sediments of loneliness and despair. Then, I recalled the reaction of Sartre’s arch-enemy, Gabriel Marcel, who responded to this misanthropic provocation with a dramatic text in which the building on stage is full of doors—wide open and left ajar—with façades full of windows, which, like the doors, directly invite everyone, flung wide-open and bare of curtains. While Sartre regards life as a meaningless waiting for death, with each person locked in his or her private closet (with “Occupied” written on the door to deter anyone from even intending to knock), Gabriel Marcel opens the doors and creates façades with many windows, denying the necessity of solitude and celebrating the values of communion. Yet all the difference between Sartre’s and Marcel’s characters comes down to this: the former live through the meaninglessness of life in solitude, while the latter do so in company!

Footnote: Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos (No Exit), 1944. The play contains Sartre’s most famous misanthropic statement: “Hell is other people!” (“L’enfer, c’est les autres!”) By situating their characters within the limited coordinates of human life, they inevitably rendered life meaningless. For our life becomes meaningless the moment we lose the sense that we are immortal.

In the City of Invisible Light, there are not many windows; one cannot even discern whether they are open or closed. But that is as it should be, for the secret of this city does not lie in the windows, whether there are many or few, open or closed. The windows are simply there, as a fact, without any visible or emphasised symbolic role!

I realise this the moment I notice how light surges directly and irresistibly through the walls, how it seeps through the cracks in the broad façade planes, how it frames the edges of the buildings in gold, how it crowns the dark windowpanes with the blush of morning, and how it radiates from the dusky branches of the shrub at the very centre of the painting—and from each of the four shadowy figures, as mysterious as the aura of light shimmering around them.

I think to myself that Aldemar has painted what the poet Jozo Boškovski wrote in the poem “The Illuminated Man”: “The radiant man carries his shadow within himself.”

I notice that the people inhabiting Aldemar’s imaginary City of Invisible Light are slender, upright, and serene, and from their dark and mysterious silhouettes radiates a miraculous crimson light of dawn—inextinguishable, like their certainty in the value and meaning of life, and radiant with the feeling that we are eternal and immortal—that we are equal to light and created from light!

Ferid MUHIĆ Skoplje, 2017.