This Week’s Highlights: Flesh of Light

In David Humphrey’s first post with Painters on Paintings in 2014 on James Ensor’s Protrait of Augusta Boogaerts, he talks about misreading as a way into insight. Mistaking Nietzsche’s thoughts on revelation as “flesh of light,” (instead of the correct but much less interesting “flash of light”) Humphrey sees into Ensor’s work in a new way, with that epiphanic flesh of Augusta Boogaerts igniting ideas for both him and Humphrey about Ensor’s deeper relationship to his partner.Similarly Sarah Slappey, in her post about James Ensor’s Tribulation of St. Anthony from 2016, sees the paint-made-flesh of Ensor’s demons and monsters as distinctly different from those of Bosch and Breughel in paintings of the same subject. Ensor’s are more the stuff of psychic horror, nightmares of the mind, than graphic representations of the horrors of hell. In Ensor’s world, the “flesh of light” turns something potentially prosaic into the stuff of the visionary.Barry Nemett, in his 2016 post on Gwen John’s A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, explores how the light dissolves form and allows us to see even the most humble and utilitarian of objects -- a chair or parasol --as revelatory and transcendent.   All the various objects in John’s room lose their individuality and materiality, as they leave the world of solid form and become themselves a kind of flesh of light, reminding Nemett of lullabies wafting in from the open window of his childhood.