Studies in Secular Rapture

 

STREETS FROM ABOVE:

Pedestrian Flight, Faithful Ascent & American Descent

 

Caspar David Friedrich

Wanderer About the Sea of Fog (1818)

Mark Rothko

Orange and Yellow (1956)

The cityscapes of Jimmy Chen frequent scenes from above, obviously looking out  the window from an adjacent building. In no way are we to think the artist is not subject to gravitational pull. Nor is it suggested that the viewer, in looking at these painting, will be transported into some weightless consciousness. These paintings simply address the progress of our means: the ever expanding palette of views enabled by technology (from microscopes to satellites).

             Perhaps it is transcendence we are after—from Friedrich’s glorious views to Rothko’s meditation on ephemeral space—as if, to have an out-of-body experience, one simply must get their body (or mind) to another place.

While Jimmy Chen’s street elevated street views may concede to their artifice, they do examine the ambivalence that humans seem to have with altitude. A catchy Christian sound-bite goes “Your attitude determines your altitude,” where attitude is faith and altitude is heavenly ascent during rapture. Conversely (yet, ironically, somehow related), victims jumped out of windows from the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Those grainy footages of human figures falling, while aesthetic anomalies, mark a peculiar American sadness, for terror is not created but caused. Before your humble artist gets into too much trouble, let him finish with this: Falling comes after flying, so just stay where you are.

Humans cannot fly, but they can make buildings that probe the sky—a sort of modern Tower of Babel without the linguistic problems. Before the industrial revolution, landscape painting was confined to the ground-level unaided stance of the painter. Extremely passionate and eager painters like J.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich might hike for miles to perch themselves over a cliff for an elevated view, but such case were few, not to mention limited by geographic topography. Van Gogh had a certain stubborn knack for just staying put on ground level, and changing the world in front of him. The horizon is not just an invariable default for landscape imagery, it symbolizes the human visceral experience; Rothko takes it a step further by making it spiritual.

Christian Rapture

9-11 Terror Attacks