The Luminous Dark @ CGBF

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In 1825, Caspar David Friedrich painted ‘The Sea of Ice,’ a shipwreck scene he imagined taking place in the unexplored vastness of Earth’s Arctic regions. Rather than a depiction of reality, Friedrich’s painting was an early exploration of the human unconscious and a different kind of horizon, one that psychoanalysis would probe decades later. Through this painting, Friedrich sought to explore the emotions he felt after the tragic death of his brother, who as a child fell through a thin sheet of ice and drowned. Friedrich later associated these moods with nature's indifference to human suffering.

More than a century later, artists like Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and Zhang Huan began using materials connected to the messages their work was meant to evoke. Beuys used felt and fat in his sculptures—materials symbolizing the horrors of the Holocaust and the harvesting of bodies for the existential purposes of others. Kiefer used straw and dirt to illustrate the political heaviness and cultural burden of post-war Germany. Huan used incense ash collected from temples to alchemically transform images of the Cultural Revolution.

In 2016, two years after moving to Southern California, I began photographing and collecting the ashes of wildfires. Combining the ashes with white oil paint on wood panels that I burned and charred with torches, I painted ‘portraits’ of the ash clouds produced by the fires. Applied in thin, cumulative layers over extended periods, the images of ash clouds emerge from the ashy abyss of the blackened substrate. 

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