III
Gilbert-Rolfe’s paintings are beautiful not because they are associated
with the feminine, but because by looking at them we may get close to the sublime,
a feeling. The differentiation he makes between the beautiful and the sublime
is counter-productive to his phenomenological use of color. The beautiful is
a concept, the sublime a feeling. To truly get beyond discourse Gilbert-Rolfe
has to allow the viewer to access the sublime and not the beautiful, a feeling
and not a concept. It is only when he seeks exclusively to create an image that
stirs our emotions through the use of color that his rejection of discourse
will be complete.
Cézanne, too, falls into the same trap; he wanted us to think of landscape,
a concept, a thing, and not to respond emotionally to his painting. But we know
that how we look at landscape and how we conceive of it are powerfully mediated.
Neither the image of a landscape not the concept of it are phenomenological
‘essences’; they are both shaped by culture and prior knowledge.
As humans it is impossible for us to “imagine the world as it was before
it had been converted into a network of concepts and objects.” We are
always burdened by our preconceptions when we see any object. Landscape is as
much a veil as the deeply symbolic perpendicular sticks that have launched countless
men into battle. So, in order for color to lift the “veil of interpretation”
it must get us beyond the object, beyond the meaning of the object and through
to our emotional response to it.
It becomes clear that although all meaning is mediated, this is not so with
emotion. Emotion is the one response to the world that is not always governed
by discourse, prior knowledge nor culture. We must point out that emotional
responses are most often as mediated as meaning production, but there is the
possibility that this is not always so. In other words, the possibility for
an unmediated emotional response exists, whereas it will never exist for meaning.
The mere fact that an unmediated emotional response can occur allows emotion
to be the one thing that can save the phenomenological project: it may be the
one human response to the world that can be equal across centuries and cultures,
that is, universal.