In Plain Sight- by Frank McEntire

The flight of the alone to the Alone. – Plotinus

When Roger Denson stated in his book, The New Metaphysical Art, that "metaphysics resurfaced in 80s art through a search for the sublime," he underestimated the breadth and intent of artists dedicated to expressing the spiritual through their work. Actually, this type of work did not resurface – it has been an element of contemporary art all along, but not widely recognized, pushed to the edges of art criticism until more recent times as reframed modernist history or as a post-modern phenomenon.

But even the word "spiritual" cannot be disassociated from its historical and culturally bound connotations. According to art critic Roger Lipsey, "spiritual remains an old-fashioned word of vague meaning. Yet it is the word that [Wassily] Kandinsky seeded into twentieth-century art, and apart from any individual, it still speaks. It requires a positive response from us."

This "positive response" gives distinction to David Linn’s devotional paintings exhibited in "The Peripheral World" at the Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Linn describes his approach "as meditations, attempts to provide … evidence of a spiritual process. They are also offerings, fashioned objects of devotion."

There are two ways to explore the spiritual in contemporary art – devotional and heretical. The latter heretical approach often makes artworld headlines. Criticism and sarcasm are powerful tools in the hands of artists to expose the absurdities of politics, religion, and our social condition. As for the former approach, artists who advance their work on a devotional level seldom find print in glossy art magazines, but they wrestle just the same with life’s conundrums, as do their more satirical counterparts.

The strength of Linn's paintings comes from their simplicity and technical achievement. His work is easy to dismiss as simple and obvious in its starkness; yet, the greatest mysteries are always hidden in plain sight. Whether occupied by or existentially void of figures, Linn’s command of mood, detail, and tone coalesce in a vibration of expectation. Viewers who identify with his work feel as though they, too, are strangers in desolate lands, struggling for meaning, rewarded by awe. The settings in his work often depict dark, barren landscapes, some with plumes of smoke or spits of fire on a distant horizon, others with talus-strewn fields penetrated by draperies suspended from the heavens.

An instance that shows Linn’s dexterity as a painter of textile is "Departing." A skein of fabric is suspended, center frame, in the air with no visible supports, gathered in the middle by a cord pulled by opposing twin figures. A fire consumes it, which illuminates the dark and barren landscape. The paint is so thinly applied to the surface that it could have been breathed into existence.

Like a method actor, Linn poses his figures (self-portraits) in mid-inquiry as if captured in a staged sepia-tone photograph, arresting the moment that the mystery is realized or question posed. Linn, however, chooses to capture only the gesture of the figure and hint at the issue being probed, leaving an open mystery to ponder.

As a symbolist painter, Linn attempts to explore the many questions encountered along the varied and stony path of his solitary journey. The smoke and flames that rise into the sky in many of his works, such as "The Small Prophecy," could, for example, be residues of unknown events in a distant place, or of burnt offerings surfacing from unseen and faraway altars. The viewer only knows that these whirling pillars of atmospheric disturbance are the product of some unnamed event: Sacrifices? Wars? Pollutions? "Just why certain modes of expression or images galvanize my psyche is a mystery to me and I believe it should largely remain so," the artist notes.

Linn's iconic images are composed atop an underlying structure inspired by divine symmetry, a sacred geometry. This subliminal device, reinforced by Linn’s use of intense illuminations provided by holy fire or other single sources of light, helps draw the viewer into each painting’s story without much need for explanation. Embedded in the work is a sophisticated spiritual intent, and the resulting paintings are material evidence of a contemplative mystic set in a time desperately in need of vision.

The worldview Linn presents through his paintings is not one of estrangement or withdrawal into melancholy. Instead, it presents the bold and mysterious journey we all take between birth and death, a symbol-accented exploration that, as Roger Lipsey might say, "requires a positive response from us."

Frank McEntire, a sculptor and curator, is the executive director of the Utah Arts Council and former art critic for The Salt Lake Tribune and Salt Lake Magazine.