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expressions of sacred people and never renounced the all-embracing force that had proved so efficient throughout the previous millennium.
Yet we should go one step further and see the underside of these religious art practices based on figuration, for we shouldn’t forget that we are speaking of realities that are in themselves unshapeable, unrepresentable, invisible, like the mysteries of faith.5 Practicing a ‘natural’ art in the sphere of the unnatural is an exercise filled with misunderstandings and challenges: it cannot be based on
a search for resemblance (as in the genre of portraiture or landscape painting) because no visible term enables the comparison. And indeed for centuries it was only possible thanks to allegorical mechanisms of displacement that allowed the introduction of this enigmatic dimension thanks to a network of signs: a bright cloud, a certain way of raising the eyes or extending the hands, a lily, a ring of light around a head, a soap bubble ... all that which academic history has eas- ily simplified under the term iconography, yet which conceals areas of shadow and a profuse network of interpretative layers and dark theological meanings.
II.
When modern twentieth-century society began to experience the inevitable process of secularisation that ceased to acclaim the hackneyed conventionalisms of Christian art, artists turned to their intuition of divinity, exploring new forms unrelated to old rituals and devout practices equally based on an otherworldly, introspective and immaterial imagination. The life of the spirit took centre stage again in an openly programmatic way when Kandinsky wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1910, in which he advocated the leap into the void entailed by the invention of abstract painting and its vocation to express an ‘inner need’. This opening towards awareness, this interior gaze allowed Kandinsky’s generation to forget everyday life and its accidents which they considered a hindrance, as did Plotinus, and assign art the task of deciphering the metaphysical breath embod- ied in material life. Kandinsky’s theory caused a small upheaval in the society of the period, similar to Malevich’s spellbinding transformation of krasny ugol (the ‘red corner’ in country houses where the sacred icon of the home was honoured) in Black Square on White Ground that same year, thousands of miles away, which enabled him to render a supreme world, an empty, weightless and endless desert. These experiments among many others left their mark, which, despite being neglected during much of the twentieth century, never completely disappeared.
Notions of sacredness, spirit, religion and mysticism have re-emerged in significant artistic proposals, quite different to all previous experiments, in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. Biblical themes such