The world of traditional meaning discloses itself to the interpreter only to the extent that his own world becomes clarified at the same time.
Jürgen Habermas 1
The painting represents a fragment of urban landscape, cloaked in fog. The street is empty of people, without the busyness of the business of urban life. A few vehicles are parked at the curb to the left. At first, one might suppose the white objects at the upper center left to be feathers, thus leading one to suppose Fog to be an urban restaging of the Fall of Icarus. Closer inspection reveals the white objects to be sheets of paper. The fog is not hanging motionless but is roiling with turbulence, impacting the pavement in the middle distance, cascading forward toward the viewer's space, shrouding the scene in darkness. The double yellow line leading back into the fog signifies it is not to be crossed, that one is not to pass. It is morning in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, and the fog is the fog of war, the dust cloud of the collapsed World Trade Center.
Fog does not immediately disclose itself, but requires a sustained engagement and close looking. The sfumatura and tenebrism of the works conduces to the need for this, as does the subtlety of signification. Beyond their specific reference, this is the supervening content of Rex Kare's works: that fullness of meaning is not had superficially and without labor, that the effort of sustained looking, of looking closely, is repaid.
So also in Peace. A seated nude female figure, seen from the right side, sits disconsolate with forearms on knees. The site is a desolate littoral landscape at the boundary between the two domains of land and sea, overlooking an estuary, locus of the ebb and flow of tides: a transitional zone. The figure holds an olive branch. The iconology is conventional, a personification of Peace. Though not entirely apt, in the sense of not being a direct correspondence serving as an urtext to the painting, the sum of feeling elicited by Peace suggests Auden's lines:
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead. 2
But again, one must look closely. The figure is seated on a pile of human skulls. Peace rests on death. Peace comes to rest at a terrible price.
Untitled, with its luminous sky over a brooding dark landscape, is temporally equivocal. Like the light at the right of the horizon in Peace, the luminous sky of Untitled is twilight. Whether the twilight is that of dawn or of dusk is indeterminate. The signification of the luminosity in itself is determinate, there being a venerable tradition of its deployment as a correlative of spirituality from antiquity to Abbot Suger to the American Luminist painters of the nineteenth century, and more recently and perhaps more problematically in the paintings of Mark Rothko and Ross Bleckner. An important aspect of that tradition is the association of light and beauty. Thus Robert Grosseteste: "Light is beautiful in itself, for its nature is simple and all of it is there at once." 3
To speak of beauty may seem apt in regard to Kare's large Untitled, and the smaller scale studies in the exhibition: Waiting, Untitled, Portrait of Goran and Goran, Drawing a Self Portrait. Perhaps it seems anything but apt in regard to Fog and Peace: that the artwork is beautiful though the things referenced by the artwork-"devastations of war, and so on" 4-are not beautiful in themselves.
If the question of beauty as a moment in aesthetic judgment was problematic for Kant, it is the more so, if differently so, for us, and indeed has produced something of a cottage industry of discourse in the past decade. 5 Differently so than for Kant, even if the Kantian project is in no small measure foundational for modernism, in that the notion of beauty as a criterion for art comes to be refused by the avant-garde within modernism. 6 Given its historicity, the question of beauty is an index of the situation of art and lifeworld, as Alexander Alberro notes:
At the most immediate level, the calls for a return to beauty's order and perfection are part and parcel of a rejection of the political dimension of the phenomenon that came to be referred to as postmodernism. 7
But Alberro may paint with too broad a brush, for as Danto, citing the example of Jacques-Louis David's Marat Assasiné, has urged:
beauty in art need not be antithetical to political action, as so many advocates of anti-aesthetics, meaning more or less specifically anti-beauty, appear to think. 8
Looking closely is repaid with the disclosure of the meaning of the world of the artwork and of the lifeworld within which one indwells.
Rex Kare received the Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art, and the Bachelor of Art from the University of Dallas. Kare has taught at Brookhaven College and at the University of Dallas since 2002. Recent exhibitions include: Recent Work, University of Dallas, 2003; Recent Works, Betz Gallery, Houston, 2002; Convergence, New York Academy of Art, 2002; Inaugural Exhibition, Vine Arts Gallery, Houston, 2001.