The Gods and Art
Since the dawn of human civilization, the gods have captivated artistic imagination. In cave paintings, prehistoric humans depicted their relationship with nature, painting animals as cultural symbols and elevating them to the level of gods. Ancient mythologies and pagan religions visualized deities through symbols reflecting humanity's connection to nature, imbuing these images with the power of natural forces. Worshiping these images aimed to harness those forces, enabling believers to cope with and overcome the struggles of existence. Art became a visual medium through which the gods mitigated the forces of nature and a social tool for establishing religious authority.
Early Jewish monotheism sought to eradicate such natural-artistic representations of God by prohibiting graven images in the second commandment ("Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image"). Instead of portraying gods intertwined with the forces of nature, Judaism positioned God as the creator of nature and the embodiment of the metaphysics governing it. The only evidence for God's existence, as Maimonides emphasized, is not merely nature itself, but rather the abstract laws that make nature work in the best possible way (Guide of the Perplexed, III, 51). In such a scheme, godly images are meaningless, and Jewish culture for generations detested any tendency towards visualization. Jews diverted their focus from worldly visual currents and instead concentrated on comprehending God's omniscience by rationalizing laws and immersing believers in an abstract, textual, intellectual culture.
With the spread of monotheism, pagan figurative art had to be accommodated. Along with the rise of Christianity and its institutionalization as the religion of the Roman Empire, emperors Constantine (272-337) and Theodosius I (347-395) baptized pagan art. Banners of Jesus and the cross, iconography of saints, and painted images of biblical scenes replaced sculptures of Roman gods, transforming art worship into a major tool for embodying the omnipresence of God. Art served as both the medium and the foundation upon which religious beliefs were visually instilled in viewers. Throughout history, a significant portion of artworks were purely religious. From the nineteenth century onward, artists began to shift away from explicit institutional religious manifestations, transforming art into a tool for existential religious experience. While art acted as a key component in Christian culture, Jewish culture lacked a significant artistic tradition.
Rational Abstraction and Art
All this changed at the turn of the twentieth century when the possibilities embodied in abstract art shifted the equation. The open modern society allowed for the integration of Jews into the public sphere, forcing them to abandon their traditional self-secluding culture. With this shift, Jews entered society, bringing with them their unique virtue of abstract comprehension, cultivated throughout centuries. This manifested in various fields. For example, in the natural sciences, Jewish contributions were scarce until the turn of the century. However, with the opening of societies, Jews began to engage in various scientific disciplines, bringing with them their approach of rational abstraction, which consequently directed them mostly to theoretical, rather than experimental, physics. Concurrently, secularized Jews who abandoned the practice of religious laws and the communal way of life entered the art world, bringing with them their inclination towards abstraction and establishing a new school of art. Instead of the age-old figuration of God and nature, abstract artists tended towards atheism and promoted a new perception of the universe: one devoid of natural objects. In the absence of natural objects, the presence/absence of God became an implicit theme, forcing viewers to confront the essence of human existence.
Harold Rosenberg once asked, “Is there a Jewish Art?” (Commentary, June 1966), probing the possibility of distinctly Jewish art and stating that what motivated artists of Jewish origin in the mid-20th century was predominantly the metaphysical theme of identity. From this point on, the work of Jewish artists rose to a new level. Instead of conceiving the artist as merely representing the external world, artists like Rothko, Newman, Gottlieb, and others began to assert their individual relationship to art; their self-reflections on the process of creation. Such artists not only expelled religious themes from their paintings but more importantly, detached Form from Matter, exploring the possibilities of representing an un-formed reality. Free-standing geometrical shapes became the hallmark of such art, insinuating the possibility of a purely formal and abstract notion of God. Although it seems like a profound and uniquely Jewish expression, what they created was, as individuals who happened to be of Jewish origin, a genuinely American art—a universal art that speaks to all sentient humans.
In that essay, Rosenberg tried to define the contours of future Jewish art, coining the phrase “Metaphysical Judaica”—an abstract reflection on the process of creating folk ceremonial Judaica. In a sense, Rosenberg’s prediction has manifested itself in the 21st century.
Igal Fedida the Creationist Abstract Artist
Can traditional Jewish themes be represented in abstract art? Could Jewish textual culture be incorporated into an image? Is it possible to transform the motto of abstract art—the artist’s self-reflection on the creation of art—into the artist's reflection on the creation of everything, of the universe itself? Artist Igal Fedida raises such questions, generating what Rosenberg might have defined as “Metaphysical Judaica”—a truly Jewish abstract art. As an observant Jew of Israeli-Moroccan origins, Fedida’s artistic experience is also religious. As a friend who has been following his artistic development, I want to conceptualize how his religious contemplations on the very first moments of the creation of the universe led him to develop a unique religious abstract art. By focusing his art and efforts on bringing metaphysical notions to the forefront and visualizing them, Fedida aims to transform the act of viewing his artworks into a religious experience.
In a way, Fedida’s work aims to re-introduce God into abstract art. He asks a fundamental question: how can we visualize abstract notions of God? Whereas classical Christian religious art aimed to use art as a means to assert and represent the omnipresence of God in the universe, Fedida highlights the omniscience of God as the only true essence. To do so, he follows the Maimonidean principle of “Negative Theology” (Guide for the Perplexed, I 58). Accordingly, God cannot be found in matter or object, and the only way to determine God’s qualities is by negating them in relation to reality—God is not matter, is not a shape, etc. “Negative Theology” accentuates the limited human capacity to grasp the universe beyond the known notions of space and time. Maimonides led Fedida to contemplate the existence of God on the borders between the preceding void and the current universe and to paint his subjective metaphysical vision of that hazy and illusive borderline.
For Fedida, the presence of God in the human mind exists before the process of creating art, in contemplating, reflecting, and speculating on the possibility of the void. Such cognitive activity necessarily fixes the artist's mind on one major theme—the process of the creation of the universe. While Rothko and his generation centred art on the process of making art, Fedida contemplates the act and process of the creation of the universe and projects it onto the process of creating art itself, thus converging the process of universal creation with the process of creating art.
The only time in universal history, when humans grappled with abstract reality, was at the very first phase of creation. Thus, the concentration on the process of creation of the universe, "Ma’aseh Bereshit" (the act of genesis), attempts to capture an objective abstract, characterized by motifs of drama and tragedy on a grand scale. The contrast between coping with everyday subjective experience, as in abstract expressionism, and confronting or contending with the creation of the universe, manifests itself in the different loci of the sense of drama and tragedy. In dealing with everyday experience, the drama is invoked subjectively in the experience of the spectator, whereas in visualizing the process of creation, the drama is in the theme of the painting itself. However, as Fedida argues, the creation of the universe is not an ancient event or a far-removed subject. Fedida emphasizes that every morning he is captivated by a verse from the morning prayer service, which depicts God as “regenerating every day, in His grace, the process of creation.” The daily reading of this verse urges him to gaze in awe at the world. In a sense, Fedida’s art is an interplay between reflecting on the creation of the universe and self-reflecting on the creation of art, aiming to convey the sentiment of the everlasting creation of things. He paints the genesis of the universe, before the creation of the categories of time-space and form-matter, to become, in mind and spirit, part of the primordial conditions of existence. There, in that unique moment in the history of the universe, an objective abstract condition, one can encounter the shadow of the Creator himself.
Primordial Colors of Existence:
Dealing with metaphysical and cosmological themes of creation may lead one to “the heart of darkness”; into a grim, heavy, and gloomy experience. However, by contrasting wild, diverse, and vibrant colors, Fedida generates a mélange of drama, tragedy, and joy, allowing a powerful sentiment of resilience to emerge, which is the most essential component of any creation. Fedida appropriates Kabbalistic theories of color symbolism (Zohar, “Shmot,” I 21-30), attaching them to each rung in the ladder of creation and internalizing them into the personal existential experience of individuals. Each color corresponds to a particular rung in the ladder of creation, as well as representing a metaphysical theme. Black and white epitomize the primordial condition of the universe when it was “formless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep,” representing the void—nothingness. Fedida uses the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Hebrew phrase “Tohu wa-bohu” (formless and empty), accentuating the literal meaning of “bohu”—in it—to argue that in that primordial condition, everything was encapsulated within it. Just as a black body can absorb light and energy, and white light when passed through a prism, breaks down into the natural spectrum of colors, the macrocosm is reduced to a microcosmic interpretation. Accordingly, black and white also represent the everyday primordial condition in which an individual wakes up in the morning to see the first light and to sense a strong sentiment of void.
Yellow signifies the “lights in the vault of the sky,” the illuminating celestial bodies—the sun, moon, planets, and stars. Fedida connects the physical light of the celestial bodies to the intangible light that shines in our souls, stressing that once we open our eyes in the morning, beams of physical light enter through them, transforming vision into emotions, cognitions, and thoughts.
Blue stands for wisdom, specifically the universal divine wisdom that beats in human hearts, without which one could not start their day. We think, make plans, organize our daily schedule, and fuel ourselves with motivation, vitality, and hope. Just as experientially blue is identified with the endless sky and oceans, so too on the microcosmic level it embodies the indispensable and infinite nature of hope and creativity.
Green acts as our connection to nature. We wake up in the morning, open our eyes and let light in, start thinking, and then get out of bed and put our feet on the ground, connecting our bodies to the body of mother nature, beginning with practical activity.
Violet is very rare in Fedida’s paintings. Just as in nature, the powerful ultraviolet radiation in space is not detected from Earth (the Ozone layer blocks it), and it is concentrated mostly around black holes, so too in life, Fedida stresses, to encounter the violet elements of our Being, we must go on an inner journey to find meaning beyond the immediate tenets of our lives. Fedida uses the literal meaning of the Hebrew name for the color, “sagol”—“unique”—to classify it as “the color of the fifth dimension,” signifying the borderline between life and meaning, forcing us to consider the possibility that we merely live a life of void, and thus propelling us to search for essential meaning.
This illusive borderline between void and reality was the subject of a famous essay by Martin Heidegger titled “What is Metaphysics?”, which probes the possibility of defining the void in and of itself, without recourse to negating reality. Such a discussion aimed to demarcate the realm and role of metaphysics in existential philosophy, particularly in reducing such contrast to the individual and paralleling the cosmological concern over the void and matter to the existential anxieties over life and death. In a sense, the drama and tragedy that stand out in Fedida’s art echo such concerns. The axis of his paintings is indeed the cosmological juxtaposition of void and reality, though the subjective experience of the spectator yields an existential anxiety over life and death. In reaction, such an experience generates inner vitality that is symbolized by red.
By duplicating the symbolic colors of each rung of creation and then reducing it to the creation of art, Fedida produces visual representations of metaphysical questions and urges the spectator to look for personal meaning within the bigger picture of universal creation. And indeed, the experience of gazing deeply into space and observing objects that embody the creation of stars and galaxies—like nebulas, supernovas, black holes, and quasars—places the observer, not in space, but in an inner space of searching for meaning.
Representing an Objective Condition of the Abstract:
More than any other conceivable object in the universe, Fedida’s paintings unintentionally resemble nebulas, both in shape and in their diverse, vibrant colors. Fedida’s general technique of moving from a particular point within the painting outward, generates seemingly chaotic and random lines and colors that spread to the edges of the frame, eventually bringing a mindful image into being. Each of those “drip-lead lines” is the offspring of tens of thousands of repetitive expressions, with unique symmetries and relationships, always striving for balance. In a way, the bold movements do not merely parallel the creation of the universe with the creation of art but more particularly reflect the inner storm of the artist, a storm that aims to untangle his convoluted soul through the act of creation.
Simply put, just as the universe as a whole, and stars in particular, were created in a powerful explosion, an outpouring of enormous energy, so too do Fedida’s chaotic, yet symmetrically shaped paintings reflect a spontaneous generation—an immediate outburst of emotions and thoughts that are impatiently thrown, in bold and daring motions, into the world. This motif of boldness calls upon people who confront the theme of void and matter, or generation and decay, to boldly live life through creativity and creation.
Text and Image:
Although the prohibition of graven images in Jewish law resulted in a culture with weak foundations in visual art, this ban also established a culture with strong textual groundings, which cultivated reason over the image and allowed for the emergence of a unique capacity for mental abstraction. Such an innate inclination eventually channeled, as Rosenberg highlights, Jewish artists in two directions—abstract expressionism and traditional Judaica. This led Rosenberg to depict the future of Jewish art as “Metaphysical Judaica.” Fedida’s art is not only “metaphysical Judaic” due to the incorporation of Kabbalistic symbols for the ladder of creation or because of the way he connects them with the creation of art. Fedida’s “metaphysical Judaica” is best exemplified in the way he intertwines text and image, vision and words, particularly by integrating phrases that allude to ancient ideas about cosmology and metaphysics. This combination of the visual and the textual demonstrates the artist’s inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to escape what has been portrayed as a cultural trait that significantly inhibited Jewish visual art. Fedida turns this seeming burden into an advantage, creating art that combines abstract images of outbursting creation with Hebrew text, mostly from traditional ancient sources. Inspired by one of the most fundamental Kabbalistic texts, Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation), he conceives of the Hebrew letter as possessing metaphysical power. Words, sayings, texts, and books are not merely tools by which God is depicted, but the very soil from which the presence of God in the world grows.
Thus, by combining perceptive experiences of abstract images, which appeal to inner emotions, with texts that appeal to reason, Fedida generates a unique artistic experience of feeling and thinking simultaneously. Such an approach was extensively used in Islamic art, which also appears as a strong source of inspiration. Fedida, an Israeli artist of Moroccan origins, conceives of the art of Arabic calligraphy and the Sephardic style of handwriting as an inescapable traditional cultural backdrop against which he creates contemporary art, echoing voices of artistic tradition from various epochs and civilizations. The combination of text and image aims to produce a perception that goes far beyond reason and senses, taking the viewer beyond the categories of the phenomenal world that inherently inhibits our ability to conceive of the noumenal world. Fedida’s “metaphysical Judaica” yields a mystical and illuminating experience, ultimately re-introducing God to abstract expressionism.
