Artist’s Statement: The Unobservable Totality of Light

by Adi Da Samraj

My image-art can be characterized as paradoxical space that undermines “point of view”. That undermining allows for a tacit glimpse, or intuitive sense, of the transcendental condition of reality—totally beyond and prior to “point of view”.

My process of image-art is always purposed to transcend point of view and, if the resultant images are received seriously and viewed seriously, they are a means for tacitly feeling the perfectly egoless condition of that which is perceived.

By making image-art, I am making “space” for what is beyond and prior to “point of view” and ego-“I”.

My process of creating images brings together two principal elements, in a complex approach. One is the comprehensive element of form, and the other is the element of fundamental content, or essential meaning. On the one hand, I constantly exercise the formal element. By means of an always spontaneously free process of improvisation, I strictly control and order the structure of the images I invent. On the other hand, I am intent upon maintaining the characteristic of meaning. Indeed, the meaning-content is always primary. The meaning-context, rather than the formal context in and of itself, is always the “subject” to which I respond by making image-art. Therefore, I insist that the work I do with the formal aspects of an image coincide with the preservation and enlargement of the fundamental context of meaning—no matter how much of an abstraction the image may become in the formal process of improvisational invention. Consequently, the tension between meaning and form is fundamental to all the image-making work I do.

The idea—expressed by Cézanne, and by various other artists and artistic movements since the time of Cézanne—that artistically fashioned visual form is to be based on primary geometric elements has also been fundamental to the artistic training and familiarity I have developed with art, from the time that I was a boy. Indeed, if the deep process whereby the brain makes perception happen is profoundly felt, then it can also be understood that the basis of the natural world’s construction as perceptual experience is primary geometry, or elemental shape—curved, linear, and angular. Everything perceived is a structure that demonstrates the interaction of these three all-patterning forces of shape. The unknowably complex intersection of circles, squares, and triangles—or of curved, linear, and angular geometric, or geometrically-organizing, forces—structures and organizes virtually every perceptible natural shape.

The natural world itself is a self-morphing and self-limiting construction, or a naturally improvised and spontaneously self-organizing art-form, formalized and fabricated by means of a plastic interaction between primary forces and structures. But the natural world is so complex in its combinations of root-forces of shaping energy—and, thus, of primary geometries—that, except in some generalized sense, the primaries are not perceived. However, it is altogether possible to tacitly feel that whatever is being perceived is something structured in the primary geometric manner, and that, consequently, all apparent complexity is based on very simple primary elements. My image-art is, on this basis, a demonstration of the naturally perceived world as multiples of primary geometries.

My images are about how reality is—and they are also about how reality appears, in the context of natural perception, as a construction made of primary shaping-forces. My image-art is, therefore, not merely “subjectively” or, otherwise, “objectively” based. Rather, the images I make always utterly coincide with reality as it is. Therefore, I have called the process of the image-art I make and do “Transcendental Realism”.

The living body inherently wants to be one with the matrix of life. The living body always wants to allow the light of perfect reality into the “room”. Assisting human beings to fulfill that impulse is what I work to do by every act of image-art.

My images are created to be a means for the fully participating viewer to locate fundamental light—the world as light, all relations as light, naturally perceived light as absolute light.

My images, well-met, should bring tears to the eyes, restore laughter to the life, and, altogether, both show and give a perfect equanimity to the total world.

Ultimately, when “point of view” is transcended, there is no longer any separate self at all—but only love-bliss-brightness, limitlessly felt, in vast unpatterned joy.