Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, March 21, 2024
Speaker: Lucas Buch (Universidad de Navarra)
On the occasion of the seminar held on March 21, 2024, Professor Lucas Buch of the University of Navarra shared some interesting reflections on the relationship between avant-garde art and the theology of the icon. Bearing in mind Heidegger’s criticism of ontotheology, the deconstructive spoliation of contemporary art was compared with the epiphanic and sensitive art of icons. Certain contemporary art does not like material reality and for this reason tries to destroy it: in this perspective it is therefore very distant from the so-called “access to sophia“. Nonetheless, the demolition that accompanies the sense of nostalgia typical of some other forms of abstract art characterizes a search for a return to the essence, that establishes a significant contact between avant-garde art and the art of icons. For example, in the art of Kasimir Maleviĉ this contact is clearly perceptible. His “black square”, according to Carboni, is “the last icon”. Here the artist does not try to represent life but to provoke it. The black square represents an embryonic reality, it is the germ of every possibility.
Art has known various expressive moments. In Renaissance and then Baroque art, perceptive realism and sensualism petrified the observer, because in artistic expression the signifier ended up taking the place of the signified. The emptying and search for minimalism in contemporary art, as well as the evocation of the sacred, inaugurate a new role in the viewer’s way of posing in front of the work of art: to approach it a active, no longer passive, gaze is required. The emptiness achieved gives life to a new man: art reaches silence, thus being able to express the sacred. In artists like Fontana or Rothko, the mystique of emptying – or the encounter with full light – is profoundly distant from the acceptance of nothingness in Duchamp or from the mere provocation of his “Fountain”. Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House seems to recall Guardini’s words in his “Letters from Lake Como”: here the nothingness, the almost-nothingness, recalls an apophatic attitude, in which emptying becomes a sacrament, a living expression of the sacred. Something similar happens in the art of icons too. In Renaissance art, perceptive realism and sensualism ended up making every representation self-referential: the signifier took the place of the signified (so Florenskij). In this phase the depiction produced religious themes but did not refer to a “beyond”. This perspective appears reversed both in a certain part of avant-garde art and in that of icons, where art is born from silence, and we are the vanishing point.
However, the icon has its own peculiarities. Since its inception it has been inextricably linked to the New Testament and the Incarnation, striving to avoid a relapse into idolatry. Not every iconographic representation is accepted by the nascent Church but only that faithful to the iconographic canon of the Gospel. The icon constitutes a point of arrival of a traumatic process which is also connected to the history of the Church Councils. What was at stake was not art but the true confession of the dogma of the Incarnation and of Christian anthropology. The icon makes an option for laconicism and simplicity: it wants to represent the person of Christ (what is visible), which is at the same time a place of the invisible (divinity united with humanity). For this reason, this art is necessarily symbolic, it puts us in contact with a reality that is salvation that is given. The spiritual in art puts us in contact with reality: by blocking hyperrealism, the invisible takes shape from the visible.
