Elliot Wolfson has long been preoccupied with the insights of Jewish mystical traditions that approach an imageless God through the mediation of an intensely visual symbolic imaginary. Such a paradox gives rise to intriguing questions. How does the heart see the invisible? How does the imagination give form to what remains nonetheless formless? Here the quintessentially human endeavor of hermeneutics is already caught up in the transcending eros of a divine creativity. What kind of body is God’s body, which reveals itself, and also veils itself, not only in the ethereal image of a heavenly Adam but also in the shimmering letters of an inscribed book of law? In what sense is the material creation God’s body? The overflow of creativity may itself involve the withdrawal or disappearance of its author, who is both hidden by and discernible in the traces of creation--in the flow of creativity itself.

The paintings that Wolfson has generously agreed to exhibit publicly for the first time in conjunction with the Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium on “Apophatic Bodies” may be seen to intersect with the colloquium’s theme in a number of ways. The organizers chose “Luminal Darkness” for its publicity materials in part because the painting’s palette seems to hint at the darkly shining depths of mysticism’s apophatic vision, even as those depths give rise to forms that are almost, but not quite, recognizable figures. The viewer will discover in a great many of Wolfson’s canvases a sense that vision hovers on the borders of form and formlessness, appearing and disappearing, disclosure and hiddenness. Here let us take brief note of just three others among them. “(E)met” plays on embodiment as inscriptional or literal, as the Hebrew letters that spell “truth” (aleph-mem-tau) both emerge and dissolve at the painting’s center, an emergence/dissolution that begins with the first (or to some eyes, the last) letter, performing the translation of “truth” into “death” (mem-tau) and back again. Thus affirmation and negation, birth and death, visibility and invisibility continuously fold into one another. “Broken Landscape” may, in turn, seem to gesture toward the partial, gapped, and fragmented character not only of language or knowledge but also of the broader process of incarnation itself. “Passion” diverges from many of Wolfson’s other works in the starkness and energy of its palette and brush strokes, as if bespeaking the unspeakable violence that emerges at the meeting point of Jewish and Christian traditions of suffering witness.

Words about paintings should surely be unsaid as soon as they are spoken. Or: let the paintings un/speak for themselves.