Curator’s Note

“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness...”  Genesis 1:26

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Image and Likeness gathers works of sacred and contemplative art that uncover the traces of the Creator found in the human form, and works that echo divine creativity in the process of artistic making. Formed in different media and traditions, each work hints at a relationship between unseen forms and the earthly representations shaped by the artist’s imaginations and hands. The art exhibited reveals the grace animating the material world, the saintliness potential within men and women, and a mysterious depth to all creation, a depth keenly seen by St. Francis ofAssissi in all creatures.

 

These works are sourced from rising and established artists in various media including painting, sculpture, and illustration. They range from representational paintings illuminated with the beauty of likeness, to prints that not only recover but rework the traditions of intricate pattern and symbol, to sculpture and assemblages that present symbols of faith in rounded dimensions. Influenced by ancient traditions of iconography and classical art, or drawing from newer media and disciplines, these artists continue to uncover mysterious depths through the union of skill and inspiration.

 

“St. Lucy: Beacon of Light” by Blair Barlow presents the saint with her familiar attributes: the eyes of faith and the eyes lost in her passion, the palm and crown of martyrdom: but it is in the form and clarity of the art itself where the saint’s purity and likeness to the divine is lucidly presented.The overwhelming radiance of light streams from this work as well as others in this exhibit.

 

In works presented from Ann Schmalstieg Barrett, light and shadow texture overlapping layers of loss, hope, and the redemption of time, in images that condense the mortal world into tightly assembled scenes.Her explorations of novel media and the shape of music in “Requiem Tract: Absolve” create a work at once thickly rooted in tradition while also daringly new.

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In her version of the key symbol of Western Christian art and liturgy, Eve Palguta’s “Crucifix” expresses the very suffering of the Passion in the rough plasticity of its surface, while maintaining a proportioned tenderness of expression.

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And in an illustration print from Daniel Mitsui, “Sacred Heart of Jesus”, the surface of the composition is worked in a supremely ordered web surrounding the expressive face of Christ—interweaving the fluid knots of Celtic art is a bestiary of animals of land and sea, populating a Creation in miniature.

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These selected examples, and all the works of art presented in “Image and Likeness”, speak for themselves more eloquently than words can. All the same, two essays accompanying this exhibit attempt to explore the particular vision that emerges from these works. With the Incarnation, God’s self-revelation in the tangible person of Jesus Christ, the world received a new, Christian understanding of the relationship to the creator in his ‘likeness.’ The relationship between art and sacramentality, between real and mysterious presence, is explored in “Presence and Prototype.” The Incarnation reframed the ancient question of idolatry, and revolutions in art reframed it again in the last century. The continuing relevance of form and beauty, as safeguards to the mission of art, is explored in “Idol or Image.”

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To all visitors, I first simply hope you find the works selected to be beautiful in the modest way defined by St. Thomas Aquinas: that they give pleasure on sight, id quod visum placet. Beyond that, may you find inspiring views into the continuing tradition of fine arts fired by a feeling for form and beauty as well as a connection between technical work and the opus Dei, the work of God, described by St. Benedict: prayer. In these works, I have found hopeful signs that art today continues to be, in the words of E.I. Watkin, a “transfiguration of the real in the light of the ideal, of nature in the light of spirit. It is the Tabor where nature is seen transfigured by the glory of the immanent Word.”

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Daniel Barbero