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Art As "Night": An Art-Theological Treatise, Gavin W. Keeney

Gavin W Keeney

Art as “Night” proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge (a-theology and theology, at once) crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. As a form of formalism, this “night” is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency.

Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as “Night” restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in …