hat is spirituality, why is it a hot topic today, and how have contemporary painters become authoritative about it? Gary Stephan's recent work points to these questions. It's not because he has changed dramatically. He has changed somewhat, at his usual, gradual, self-freshening rate. Least of all has Stephan, a sturdy agnostic, somehow gotten religion. (The story I will tell here is all mine.) But lately the world has altered around him in ways that sharply dramatize a constant concern of his art. That concern involves our willingness to believe in abstract visual illusions.

A robust presence in New York painting for nearly three decades, Stephan has always been a dancing master of painterly devices cultivated for their own sake. He still is. His works remain propositions about elegance. He tacitly offers art's most reliable reason for asking us to credit visual fiction: pleasure. We will be happier playing along than not playing along. This would be enough, still, but now a larger appeal adds itself to the picture.

Untitled, 1993

Stephan practices what Clement Greenberg called, apropos abstract paintings with suggestive elements, "homeless representation." Another epithet comes to mind, Marianne Moore's definition of poetry: "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Stephan deploys catchy, evocative shapes in illusionistic space, where they often behave to the eye as if possessed of natural gravity or buoyancy. He sets perception and metaphor in quivering tension, subtly and delightfully. We savor their interactions as if they were characters in a play or film.

Unreal adventures of emblematic entities are a familiar trope of abstract painting, grounded in Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. It looks easy, and fundamentally it has become so. Credulous susceptibilities of our eyes and minds, which modern artists (plus cartoonists and advertisers) have explored exhaustively, make us suckers for learnable tricks with figure and ground, say. Meanwhile, homeless representation's easy charm renders it hard to direct with intelligence and poise—let alone, as when Stephan does it, with wit and loveliness.

In itself, the trope means nothing. It is just another of the means by which pictures affect us. It is a technical matter. But being affected—being induced to think and feel in particular ways—is not a technical but, loosely speaking, a spiritual matter. Our speaking about spirituality is looser at some times than at others. It is ever less casual today. Stephan's past mastery of pictorial ambiguity takes on new urgency to the extent that our attention to it is newly searching and anxious.

June, 1993-1994

Spirituality names our attitude, the deepest of which the mind is capable, toward what we cannot know. It is not a content or category of thought. It is an event. It occurs at the mental perimeter where the light of consciousness, and even the dusky glow of the so-called unconscious, fades to the profound blackness of organic process—which in its turn, at some unfathomable verge in a manner impossible to conceive of, segues into the universe of everything that is dead.

Perhaps some people never contemplate this dire frontier, persisting instead on life's upsurge like ping-pong balls aloft on fountains, but I think that such people are rare. More commonly, spiritual experience in our society is a dark and inchoate, lonely phenomenon, kept mute by a kind of shame. Our own intellects may recoil from it with dread or with the indignation of injured pride. But there come moments in nearly every life when inner floodgates fly open and mystery inundates us. Are the moments good or bad, wonderful or terrible?

When they happen, we sense ourselves objectified-and diminished almost if not utterly to nothing—in the regard of an all-encompassing, all-dissolving reality. Our emotional state in that last ditch of ourselves constitutes our spiritual condition. Is it hysterical? Is it reverent? Do we feel that the great reality is benign or malignant, aware or absurd? Not only do these questions matter, no other question may truly matter except in relation to them

Here is an understatement: a psychic consequence of the 20th century in the West is disappointment with reason. Humanity was to be redeemed by science and politics, psychoanalysis and revolution. Didn't happen. A long war of intellect against spirit ends in defeat-despite the fact that, in society, organized religions keep declining. Contrary to the fancies of modern thinkers, it was never modern thought that threatened religion but always modernity itself, whose shattering effects continue unabated. Though we no longer term our hurtling movement "progress," we move unstoppably, head over heels, into an arbitrary future.

Lacking cohesive religion, spirituality itself is homeless today, and the echo of its impasse in Stephan's art strains the limits of metaphor. Impasse and art register as a virtual identity. I hasten to say that this conjunction is incidental to the paintings' quality as paintings. Big meanings by themselves don't improve art, as small meanings don't diminish it. But, in how we value any object of our experience, there is a scale of significance besides a scale of goodness. On that scale, my own long-held admiration for Stephan soars.

Nature, 1997

An English medieval mystic observed that we mistakenly feel close to things that we have clear ideas of. The truth is opposite. Clarity measures our distance from an object of thought. Ultimate reality, wrote the anonymous mystic, is met with in a "cloud of unknowing." Compare some frequent remarks of the great American pragmatist William James, to the effect that we accord mental vagueness too little intellectual dignity. In such vagueness, the roots of our being clutch for nourishment.

tephan is a precisionist of the vague, the half-thought, the intuitive, the incipient—things on the tip of the tongue, just around the corner, barely out of reach. We hate such indeterminate sensations, as a rule. Stephan's lyrical skill makes us begin to love them, as they must be loved if we are ever to be contented with our actual existence. In a way, nothing is more concrete to our minds than honest vagueness that does not resolve into forced certainty—though our yen for certainty is pretty concrete, too.

Stephan's new paintings play with the yen. They are full of resolved shapes—mostly ellipses and odd, totemic motifs that declare their confidence with brazen colors like red and orange or, sullenly, in black. The generally paler painted ground outside the shapes' contours obligingly goes atmospheric to accommodate them, but only while we look at the shapes. To a more diffuse gaze, the ground flips from negative to positive optical space. It commandeers a formal argument to which, abruptly, the shapes become futile objections.

Untitled, 1996

The shapes project will. The ground maintains knowledge. The ground has the stronger case going in and, after the shapes filibuster, prevails in the end. Painting and painted ground are essentially one, as Greenberg correctly taught while preaching, fanatically, an elimination by painters of anything incidental to that recognition. But what, except death, isn't incidental? Art is incidental to life, which is incidental to the universe. Stephan invokes classical, Greenbergian formalism to investigate how incidents of art and life transpire—never mind whether they ought to.

We live and breathe until we don't any more, and meanwhile our eyes dart about our environment, hungry for stimulus. The best abstract painting, like Stephan's, rests its legitimacy on a persuasive identification of living with looking. All paintings are consciousness surrogates—fitting over our brains like virtual reality helmets, such that we experience, as our own, thoughts and feelings that originate elsewhere. Abstraction aims to intensify this transaction's uncanniness, bending consciousness back on itself to make thought the material of thought and feeling the object of feeling.

Pleasure is indispensable here, or else our encounter with abstract painting would be an ordeal. But there are values that supersede pleasure. Otherwise we would perish of pleasure-seeking, like drug addicts. I think that higher values enter Stephan's current work by way of dissonant effects new to him—slightly harsh, abrading departures from his normal harmoniousness. One endures these notes of discomfort at first because, on balance, pleasure still predominates, then later because the irritation itself acquires significance.

Grown-up religious experience begins with the conviction that there is something wrong with us. Religions name it—as sin, say, or karma—and show how it may be redeemed by our submission to a universal power that is held to be somehow aware and essentially benign. Struggling despair thereby turns to accepting hope. For this to work, belief is indispensable. But even an unbeliever—as William James proved in his Varieties of Religious Experience—can see that it works indeed.

Belief is beyond the inner means of many of us for reasons good or bad but, at any rate, obdurate. I tend to believe in belief, at least. I know from conversation with Stephan that he doesn't, particularly. His is a secular, urbane vision that bets on the life-sustaining capacity of delicately managed aesthetic sensation. I insist only that, in his faithfulness to his vision and even without meaning to, Stephan provides timely grist to the timeless mill of the soul.