The sign is an object, and of its nature it objectifies the world. Nietzsche saw this as he accused the separation of the deed from the doer, the idea of something constant and enduring, something objectified, to have come into our thought of everything “after it had found a firm form in the functions of language and grammar.” “Root of the idea of substance in language, not in beings outside us!” However, the artistic image is something other. Art is more a spell than a language, more a chant than a declaration. It has nothing to say—it has work to do, on us, for its business is not representation but the reconfiguration of vision. The symbol is not a thought but a point of intrigued meditation. The sign objectifies the world, but the symbol vivifies the mind. It is a rumination point, an opening for the directed pensive, for the controlled brooding of the delving imagination, for the realization of that which the mind has the power and, for we are not all artists, awaits the instigation to recognize—for unless we know more than we know, unless our minds hold secrets they keep from themselves until they are deposited under the spell, there is no chance for art, we are left with nothing more than statement, and mere communication. In the artistic image, as Nietzsche saw in the characters of Greek tragedy before Euripides, there is “something incommensurable in every feature and in every line, a certain deceptive distinctiveness and at the same time an enigmatic depth, indeed an infinitude, in the background. Even the clearest figure always had a comet’s tail attached to it which seemed to suggest the uncertain, that which could never be illuminated.”

There is illumination in the darkness and the protocol for deep rumination in the work of Karen Gunderson, an artist of whom this author has written before in reviews and catalogue essays. The current exhibition of her paintings—13 images, three of mountains and 10 of water surfaces, all from the last few years—have the same technical strength and vigor that typify all her mature work but demonstrate a new coherence of vision, and insight, in an advanced integration of style and subject.