Shades

What is it that an artist paints in a painting? This book shows how, through shades and limits, the painter renders visible the light that confers visibility on things. It focuses on the work of Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mimmo Paladino - three painters who, each in his own way, carry painting to the limit.

---

'This fascinating book by one of the more original voices writing philosophy in English poses questions about the nature of the visible and invisible, sensible and intelligible...What makes Sallis' work so unique and important is the manner in which the problematic relation of language and plastic art is performed...An important addition to contemporary philosophical debates, it should also be taken to heart by art theorists and artists alike. It is a genuinely original work' - Dennis Schmidt.What is it that an artist paints in a painting? Working from paintings themselves rather than from philosophical theories, John Sallis shows how, through shades and limits, the painter renders visible the light that confers visibility on things. In his extended examination of three phases in the development of modern painting, Sallis focuses on the work of Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mimmo Paladino - three painters who, each in his own way, carry painting to the limit.Discussing Monet's series of paintings of wheat stacks, Sallis shows how Monet paints the very shining of the sensible as well as the elemental time of this shining.
Taking account of Kandinsky's theoretical texts as well as his monumental Compositions, Sallis reveals how at the threshold of abstraction, Kandinsky paints subjectivity itself as the scene of all appearing, as the theatre of light. Finally, Sallis considers the nomadic work of Paladino, focusing on its crossings between painting and sculpture and on the way Palladino's recondite images are situated at the limit of discourse in a way that withdraws from the order or meaning and languages while restoring the order of vision and of shining. "Studies in Continental Thought" - John Sallis, general editor.