Page 369 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Conclusion
The spiritual artist goes beyond the significance of forms or the colourful surface of their visual presence; the spiritual artist struggles to unveil the powerful invisible forces that make the essence of reality perceptible and ultimately known. The artists of the Late Byzantine period struggled hard to articulate such a vision within the context of a col- lapsing empire and a sense of lost unity; in their struggle to extract the permanent struc- tures, the foundational schemata, that compile the morphological tissue of reality, they had to explore the geometry of force, and the morphic fields that give aesthetic expres- sion its unity despite the fact that they dealt with its disparate embodiment and its frag- mented manifestations.
A parallel situation emerged in the early 20th century with a detachment from all ver- isimilitude in artistic figuration and the suspension of all naturalistic illusionist tech- niques for rendering reality – and not only in painting. For different reasons, and while being subject to different conditions, artists suggested an analogous simulacrum, a par- allel visual metaphor, with striking anti-realistic, post-physical references, in order to solve the eschatological, i.e., the ultimate question of the representability of the sensory world. In a sense, they returned to the ultimate dilemmas of the Late Byzantine period and re-envisaged the solutions that its artists gave to them, responding to the changing realities of the Orthodox world without stable points of reference except its faith in the transfiguring luminescence of the visible world. Under dissimilar circumstances, but with similar artistic needs, they both worked out a ‘mystical’ view of the real, articulat- ing the ‘theo-poetics’ of artistic sensibility and thus redefining the role of imagination in the process of constructing bridges towards the darkness of the transcendent.
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