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Transfiguring the Inexpressible. Comments to Herlinde Spahr’s book After the Storms. By Frederic C. Tubach. August 2024

The work starts with an artistic reproduction of a photo the artist took on a French beach. The bright sun behind her projects an elongated shadow onto the sand and pebbles. This becomes a guide for the reader to follow the artist into the “dangerous world” articulated in her unique art. Her visual art is a result of her existential experience following a massive bipolar breakdown. The work, in short, is a response and attempt to translate an experience that cannot be expressed directly. Language cannot capture a massive bipolar breakdown—just as no light can escape a black hole in space. Spahr proceeds to transform a breakdown into a breakthrough. An underlying intensity guides her work despite its cool, dark nightglow—no sunlight, only indirect light.

There is no direct access to the bipolar experience nor is there any escape from it via language as in normal communication. The Christian metaphor of hell is inadequate to this task. Henry James tries to articulate the experience by calling it “the vastation complex.” For Spahr, only her creative impulses guide. Four panels (pp. 6-7) illustrate her artistic efforts to transfigure the inexpressible from: 1) destruction; 2) reconstruction; 3) transformation; 4) metamorphosis to a higher level.

Spahr’s entire work is shaped by an underlying “low – high” spatial pattern. Culturally speaking, this low-high tension underlies medieval theology found both in scholasticism and gothic architecture (as described by Suger de St.Denis, the father of gothic architecture. His vision of the perfect gothic cathedral starts “low” by the quarrying of stones, to construction of an edifice that finally points “high” to  heaven).  As already mentioned, Spahr’s transformation begins with her elongated shadow. And at the end of the book, the shadow reappears, transformed as an elongated tower reminiscent of a lighthouse at the ocean. Between the elongated shadow and the lighthouse, Spahr undertakes a quest to give artistic expression indirectly to that which cannot be expressed directly. This journey takes place in just forty pages, but it encompasses the development of the artist over ten years.

There is much more to the polyphonic world of this artist. Every time you view her work, something else strikes you, something unexpected and unnoticed before: storms, seascapes, massive stone blocks, intimations of earthquakes, withering plants clinging to life or not. Her work often evokes the existence of opposites. Chaucer put it well: “By its contrarie is everything declareth.” The medieval theologian, Nikolaus von Kues, states the same idea more coolly—“coincidentia oppositorum.” There is no more striking visible expression of this than Spahr’s use of poisonous hemlock as a positive symbol of redemption.

I have a favorite panel. It lies outside the high-low framework—“Storms will come” (#6). Here we see an amazing depth perspective that reaches beyond what is visible into another kind of space, another world yet to be discovered, beyond perhaps the world of the inexpressible breakdown from which the artist escapes and into an optimistic future yet to be discovered.

Spahr’s written commentaries accentuate the polyphonic nature of the work. They provide intimate access to the existing inner landscape of the artist’s mind.

P.S. Her work reminds me of El Greco.