Page 355 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Chapter VI
perience God as Light – otherwise He is experienced as darkness. Also, he teaches that this transcendental process of experiencing God as Light is itself endless. Such Byzan- tine theological ideas seem to correspond to Rothko’s artistic achievement in a rather immediate way and it seems that the comparison is noteworthy even if – or precisely because – the correlation with Rothko’s achievement is coincidental.
For our concluding visual demonstration in this chapter, consisting of 12 images, we have selected the Late Byzantine composition of Resurrection at the chapel of the church of Chora in Constantinople. This demonstration is designed as self-explanatory, but we shall here provide some basic explanations. As seen in the sequence of the following images, beginning from the original photograph of this fresco, shown in image 60, we have gradually excluded all figural features from it, starting with the figure of Christ (image 61), leaving finally only the dark blue colour of the sky (image 68). In continua- tion, as shown in image 69, we have divided the monochromatic surface into three parts – thereby making a triptych. We have then moved the middle section of that triptych slightly higher than the other two sections (image 70) and thereby arrived at a result strikingly reminiscent of Rothko’s somber triptych in The Rothko Chapel shown in im- age 71.
The similarity of the colours is undoubted: a dark purplish-blue. And the parallel is clear: Rothko’s reduction to a somber pallet is profoundly relatable to a deep blue Byz- antine sky in the backgrounds of frescoes, especially when the latter is considered with- out the complimenting colours of the depictions of saintly figures and landscapes. There- fore, Rothko’s somber paintings homed in The Rothko Chapel in Houston, could be in- terpreted as expressing a Late-Byzantine-like experience of the divine, an eschatological experience full of silence and exalted hope. The aesthetic result of our demonstration could also be compared to the overall atmosphere of The Mark Rothko Room in the Tate Gallery of London (image 74), as well as to Rothko’s Seagram Murals displayed in the Rothko Room of the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Chiba-Ken, Japan (image 75).
Mystical Theology, written in the early 6th century by Dionysius the Pseudo-Areop- agite, which epitomises the mysticism of Eastern Orthodox theology, can be appropri- ately read during the observation of our last visual demonstration. Moreover, the final conclusion in both Mystical Theology and in our last visual demonstration (image 70), is very comparable to the aesthetic effect of somber paintings hung inside The Rothko Chapel in Houston (image 71). By surpassing all attributes that could be ascribed to the Cause of all things, the text Mystical Theology finally arrives at an enlightening truth, one which today consumes the viewer inside The Rothko Chapel, which is an enormous coincidence worth exploring.
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