Crossing the Threshold of Light
- Diamond Zhou
- Jul 11
- 17 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
July 12th, 2025
Light transcends its physical essence to become a threshold, a luminous boundary where the material world intersects with perception, meaning, and spirit. In everyday moments, a dawn breaking over the horizon, a sunbeam piercing a shadowed room, or the radiant hues of stained glass in a cathedral, light invites us to cross from unknowing to understanding, from the mundane to the sublime. In art, philosophy, and theology, light is a dynamic medium, simultaneously revealing and concealing, grounding and transcending.
The use of light in art has a storied history, evolving from symbolic and representational techniques to a primary medium of expression. In medieval art, light carried profound spiritual significance. Byzantine icons, adorned with luminous gold haloes, used gold leaf to signify holiness, distinguishing sacred figures from earthly ones. These radiant backgrounds created a visual threshold, inviting viewers into a divine realm where the material and spiritual converged. This symbolic use of light set the stage for later explorations of its aesthetic and narrative potential.
During the Renaissance, artists harnessed light to enhance realism and convey deeper meaning. Caravaggio, a master of chiaroscuro, used stark light-dark contrasts to dramatic effect. In The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600), a divine beam pierces the dim interior, illuminating Matthew and guiding the viewer’s eye to the moment of spiritual awakening. This relationship of light and shadow not only shapes the composition but also imbues the scene with a sense of divine intervention. Similarly, Rembrandt van Rijn employed light to sculpt forms and evoke introspection. In Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c. 1665–1669), a focused glow highlights his face against a muted shadowy background, drawing viewers into his inner world and creating a psychological threshold between the artist and the observer.
In the 17th century, Georges de La Tour further explored light’s mystical potential. His The Adoration of the Shepherds (1644–1645) uses a single candle to cast a soft, ethereal glow, enveloping the holy family in an intimate, sacred atmosphere. The candlelight serves as a threshold between the earthly and the divine, emphasizing the quiet reverence of the moment. By the Romantic period, artists like Caspar David Friedrich used light to convey existential depth. In Monk by the Sea (1809–1810), a solitary figure stands before a vast, luminous seascape, where the intense contrast created by the light and horizon evokes a sense of spiritual contemplation, positioning light as a boundary between the finite and the infinite.
The 19th century saw Impressionists like Claude Monet shift focus to light’s transient qualities. In his Haystacks (1890–1891) and Water Lilies (1897–1926), Monet captured the same subjects under varying light conditions, illustrating how light transforms colour, form, and perception. These works position light as a perceptual threshold, where the act of seeing becomes a dynamic engagement with the world’s fleeting beauty. These historical precedents laid the groundwork for later artists to explore light not just as a tool but as a medium in its own right.
The exploration of light as a perceptual threshold evolved dramatically in the 20th century, as artists began to treat light itself as a medium. László Moholy-Nagy, a Bauhaus pioneer, marked a pivotal shift with his Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930), one of the first kinetic light sculptures. By using rotating elements and projected light to generate dynamic shadows, Moholy-Nagy transformed light into a sculptural material that reshapes space and time, inviting viewers to experience light as a tangible presence rather than a mere illuminant.
In the 1960s and 70s, a group of Southern California artists began treating light itself as an artistic medium, explicitly engaging the threshold between seeing and knowing. The California Light and Space movement, including James Turrell, Helen Pashgian, and Robert Irwin among others, created works that dissolve the boundaries between object and observer, using light to heighten perception. These artists sought to materialize light and thereby dematerialize the art object, so that viewers become aware of their own act of seeing. Turrell famously describes his art as encouraging “seeing yourself seeing,” a state of reflexive vision in which one becomes conscious of the very process of perception. In his immersive light installations, from the controlled environment within museums such as Ganzfelds (which is a German word that describes the phenomenon of perceptual deprivation) to the monumental Roden Crater project, Turrell treats light not as something that illuminates other objects but as “a powerful substance” with which the viewer enters into a direct, bodily encounter. “We have a primal connection to it… I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space,” Turrell explains, emphasizing how carefully honed conditions of light can lead to quiet, even reverential introspection. In such moments the viewer stands at a threshold: light becomes an almost tangible atmosphere, an in-between zone where solid forms seem to evaporate into illumination and perception itself becomes the artwork.
Helen Pashgian likewise crafts objects that harness elusive optical effects, inviting viewers to move and probe the borderland between material and immaterial. Pashgian has described her sculptures as investigations of “disembodied light”, wherein light alters and dematerialises what we see. As one approaches her works, their appearance continuously shifts: glowing interiors and vivid hues emerge and retreat with the viewer’s movement. “One must move around to observe changes, coming and going, appearing and receding, visible and invisible – a phenomenon of constant movement. It touches on the mysterious, the space beyond which the eye cannot go,” Pashgian remarks. That “space beyond which the eye cannot go” is the threshold moment: an encounter with light’s mystery where perception strains at its limits. Under Pashgian’s meticulous crafting, the very physicality of the art object seems to dissolve as light and colour take on a palpable, shifting presence. What remains is an experience: a meditative confrontation with pure luminosity that hovers between external reality and internal sensation.
Robert Irwin pushed this dynamic even further by eliminating the traditional art “object” altogether in favour of manipulating light, space, and viewer awareness. Irwin noted that “to be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perceptions.” His works, from early optic paintings to later installations using scrim, fluorescent light, and entire architectural spaces, centred the viewer’s sensory experience as the true medium. Indeed, Irwin’s art makes the viewer’s perception itself the medium. Standing in one of Irwin’s illuminated rooms or before one of his subtle scrim interventions, a viewer might become aware of how light organizes the space and their own seeing process. Even an empty room can be made mysteriously charged: Irwin’s Slant/Light/Volume (1971), for example, consisted of a single angled plane of light cutting through a room, while there is nothing to “see” in the conventional sense except light itself, shaping emptiness into a volume of awareness. Such works prompt an almost phenomenological reflection in the viewer: they draw attention to how one sees, how light conditions every visual experience, and how the border between observer and observed can blur in the act of perception. This self-awareness at the moment of seeing transforms a simple encounter with light into a meditative threshold experience.
Contemporary artists continue to explore light’s potential as a perceptual threshold. Dan Flavin’s Monument for V. Tatlin (1969) uses fluorescent tubes to create minimalist installations that interact with architectural space, altering perceptions of colour and form. The cool, industrial glow of Flavin’s lights contrasts with the warm, spiritual radiance of earlier works, yet still positions light as a boundary between physical space and sensory experience. Jenny Holzer’s For the City (2005–2016) projects text onto public spaces, using light to convey social and political messages, transforming urban landscapes into canvases for illumination. Bruce Nauman’s neon work, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), combines light and text to provoke thought, bridging aesthetic and conceptual realms. Yves Klein’s Le Vide (1958, 1961) empties gallery spaces, using controlled lighting to emphasize the purity of light and space, inviting contemplation of absence and presence. Olafur Eliasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama (2011), a circular walkway with coloured glass, immerses visitors in a spectrum of light, transforming perception with the viewers’ movement, creating a threshold where the viewer’s sensory experience becomes the artwork.
Modern and contemporary painters approach light not merely as a vehicle for representation or atmospheric mood, but as a co-creator of perception itself — a generative force that activates both composition and viewer. Unlike immersive environments that engulf the body, these artists engage the eye and mind, inviting a kind of intimate optical participation. Bridget Riley, inspired by the fleeting interplay of light and shadow observed in nature, particularly during some of her travels to India and Egypt, translates the dappled radiance filtering through tree canopies into rhythmic, abstract compositions. In works like Shadowplay (1990), her lozenge-shaped patterns, born from the scattered light of leaves, shimmer with vibrant hues of blues, greens, and oranges, meticulously arranged to evoke the restless flicker of sunlight on the ground. These works do not simply represent light; they enact it. The painted shapes, animated by precise colour modulation, create illusions of vibration, movement, and depth, producing a kind of haptic vision, where the eye not only sees but feels its way across the surface. As she once noted, “a light can be built from colour”. Light thus serves a dual function in Riley’s work: it is both the originating inspiration, a memory of luminous play across the world, and the mechanism through which the viewer is drawn into perceptual destabilization, mirroring Riley’s own embodied experience of light’s dynamism.
In a similarly transcendent register, Hilma af Klint’s visionary abstractions, particularly The Ten Largest (1907), render light not as depiction but as spiritual presence. Dominated by radiant and luminous colours, which she associated in her notebooks with enlightenment and higher knowledge, af Klint’s compositions use swirling, biomorphic forms layered in tempera and gouache to conjure a luminous transparency. Her smooth, glowing surfaces appear softly backlit, as though the paintings themselves emit light from within. This metaphysical radiance aligns with her theosophical worldview, where light symbolizes divine truth and painting becomes a threshold between the visible and the immaterial.
Odili Donald Odita likewise transforms colour into a kind of light. His vivid, sharply angled bands of paint, applied in flat, unmodulated fields, create compositions that seem to pulse with inner illumination. He has described certain passages as behaving “like flashlights in a darkened space,” projecting energy outward from the wall into the viewer’s field of awareness. The spatial dynamism in Odita’s murals recalls the perceptual environments of Light and Space artists, yet his medium remains resolutely painterly: he invites light to emerge through chromatic tension and geometric force rather than physical illumination.
Joseph Kyle worked with a structured and harmonious order that evokes light’s architectural and spiritual dimensions. In works such as Radiance, Kyle’s vertical stacks of blues and yellows form what could be described as a column of light that seems to extend beyond the physical edges of the canvas. His use of dynamic colour and tenderly treated surfaces imbues his abstractions with an almost atmospheric luminosity, inviting the viewer to experience light not as an external condition, but as something revealed from within the work itself. In these carefully tuned compositions, colour is not static but radiant, resonating with perceptual memory, like a distant sunbeam suspended in form, evoking a gesture that is truly sublime.
These artistic explorations resonate with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argued that perception is not a detached analysis of stimuli but an active, bodily engagement with the world; vision, he suggested, is “ecstatic”, an act by which the eye reaches out and inhabits the world. Importantly, we do not see light itself; rather, light is the elemental condition that allows anything to be seen. As one commentator on Merleau-Ponty puts it, “The human eye cannot see light directly. Light lets people see the world around them, without being visible itself.” In his essay Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty describes how painters delve into this paradox: “Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, all of these objects of [the painter’s] quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence… The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing… to make us see the visible.” Here light appears as a threshold between nothingness and appearance, an invisible agent that “suddenly causes something to be” visible to us. Phenomenologically, light is the in-between, the medium through which subject and object meet. Experiencing a Turrell installation or an Irwin environment brings this truth forward powerfully: the viewer becomes aware of light itself as the intermediary that joins their consciousness to the world. The artwork, then, is not a static object but a phenomenon, a happening in the viewer’s perception. In this way, light-based art directly engages what Merleau-Ponty would call the “secret and feverish generation of things” in our body of perception. It reveals vision as an ongoing event, really a threshold where external light and internal awareness converge to unveil reality anew.
Beyond the art gallery and the phenomenologist’s study, the significance of light as a threshold has deep roots in theological and spiritual thought across cultures. Light is a cross-cultural symbol of knowledge, truth, and the divine, appearing in the sacred narratives and practices of many traditions. In religious contexts, light often represents the moment of passage from human into divine realms, a manifestation of presence that bridges earth and the transcendent. We see this in the Abrahamic faiths: in the Hebrew Book of Genesis, creation begins with God’s command “Let there be light,” marking the first act that transforms void into world. In Christian theology, Christ’s arrival is heralded as “a light shining in the darkness”, and Jesus is called “the light of the world” – conveying the idea of divine truth entering and illuminating the human condition. Medieval Christian mystics and theologians cultivated a rich symbolism of light: for example, the 12th-century abbot Suger designed the Gothic abbey of St.-Denis around the concept of lux nova (“new light”), believing that radiant coloured light pouring through stained glass windows could elevate the soul toward God. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, mystics spoke of the uncreated light, the ineffable glow witnessed by disciples at Christ’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, as a direct experience of God’s energy, a luminous bridge between earthly and divine being. Such theophanic light, neither ordinary nor created, stands as a threshold phenomenon: it is perceived by the eyes yet ultimately leads beyond what eyes alone can grasp, into mystical union. Thus, in Christian thought, light frequently serves as an analogue for grace or revelation, something that mediates between human perception and ultimate truth, making the unseen visible.
n the Islamic tradition, light (Arabic nūr) is equally exalted as a sign of the divine and a medium of spiritual insight. The Qur’an’s famous Verse of Light (Ayat an-Nur) proclaims, “Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth,” and likens this light to a lamp in a niche shining radiantly – a layered metaphor that Muslim commentators have interpreted as an allegory of God’s guidance and the illumination of the believer’s heart. Islamic philosophers and Sufi mystics developed entire “illuminative” metaphysics around this concept: the 12th-century Persian philosopher Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, for instance, founded a school of thought called Illuminationism (Ishrāq), positing Light as the fundamental reality and principle of knowledge. In Islamic art and architecture, these ideas found creative expression: designers of mosques and sacred spaces carefully choreographed natural sunlight and filtered colour to suggest the presence of the divine. From the intricate perforated screens (jāli) that scatter sunlight into star-like patterns, to the soaring interiors of Ottoman domes where suspended lanterns evoked the “light upon light” described in the Qur’anic verse, Islamic artists have long used light as a symbol and manifestation of divine unity. In these contexts, light transforms physical space into a threshold to the sacred, the mosque bathed in golden light feels like antechamber to heavenly realms. The worshipper’s gaze is drawn upward and inward by the play of illumination, mirroring the spiritual journey from outward ritual to inner enlightenment.
Eastern religious traditions likewise revere light as a metaphor for ultimate reality and the process of awakening. In Buddhism, enlightenment is often described in terms of light, the Buddha is frequently portrayed emanating rays, and the very term bodhi (awakening) is linked to seeing clearly, as if lit by a new light. Some forms of Buddhist meditation speak of the emergence of the “clear light of bliss” when the subtlest level of mind is reached, indicating a profound threshold where the practitioner passes beyond ordinary perception. In Hinduism, light is celebrated both cosmically and ritually: the Upanishads, ancient spiritual texts, use the metaphor of an inner light, “the light of all lights”, to describe the Self (Atman) or Brahman, the ultimate reality that shines within all beings. Hindu worship practices include the āraticeremony, where lamps (diyas) are waved before the deity; the flame or jyoti is not merely illumination but a representation of the presence of God, the offering of light becoming a conduit between devotee and deity. The annual Hindu festival of Diwali, the Festival of Lights, exemplifies how deeply light is embedded in the cultural imagination as a sign of hope, the victory of divine goodness, and new spiritual beginnings. Even beyond formal religion, in many Eastern philosophies light is intertwined with the concept of consciousness itself, as seen in the Sanskrit term prakāśa, which means light but in philosophical discourse denotes the luminosity of awareness or the light of consciousness. Such notions imply that consciousness is itself a kind of light, an illuminating power that reveals reality. To attain wisdom or spiritual liberation is often framed as “seeing the light” as crossing the threshold from ignorance into insight. Thus, across Eastern traditions, light functions both as symbol and as experiential reality: it is the threshold element by which the deepest truths are perceived or realized.
From both a theological perspective and artistic and phenomenological perspective, light serves as an intersection between the visible world and an invisible deeper truth, whether that truth is conceived as spiritual/divine or as the raw fact of one’s own perceptual act. Theologians and mystics use language of illumination to describe encounters with the divine; artists like Turrell and Irwin use actual light to orchestrate encounters with the ineffable aspects of perception. In both cases, there is an implication that light can transport or transform the observer. In various forms, human has all attempted to leverage luminosity to induce a shift in consciousness, a moment where the viewer or believer crosses into a heightened state of awareness. Light becomes a threshold between the mundane and the sublime.
When we consider the full spectrum of these insights - artistic, philosophical, theological – a coherent picture emerges of light as a liminal force. It is at once physical and metaphysical, sensory and spiritual. Light demarcates a boundary even as it links two sides: it is the line between day and night, knowledge and darkness, presence and absence. Yet it is a line that invites crossing. Light as a threshold is not an end in itself, but a means of passage, a dynamic medium through which something (vision, understanding, transcendence) is achieved. An encounter in the gallery of a revelatory moment inside a sacred space, in either case, one steps through light into an altered awareness.
The threshold quality of light also reminds us of its duality: it reveals, yet it can also conceal or overwhelm. Just as an open doorway shows a new room but also marks the end of the old one, light makes reality visible even as it renders itself invisible. We only notice light when it meets an object or our eyes; the source itself can be blinding if stared at directly. This paradoxical nature means that standing at the threshold of light often involves a sense of mystery. Many artists and thinkers have noted that intense experiences of light feel ineffable, they resist full capture in language or form. Many artists’ works do not explain light intellectually so much as allow us to dwell in its threshold state, to feel that ambiguous zone where clarity and enigma meet. Likewise, mystics in various traditions have described encounters with intense light in terms of “dazzling darkness” or a knowledge beyond knowing, a recognition that crossing the threshold of light can lead one into domains that the rational mind alone cannot navigate.
And yet, it is precisely in that surrender to light’s liminal power that profound insight or transformation often occurs. In Turrell’s words, his art aims to “set up a situation to which I take you and let you see… It becomes your experience.” In other words, the artist brings the viewer to the threshold, but the crossing, the act of seeing/illumination, is the viewer’s own. In a comparable manner, spiritual teachers might say that the ritual use of light is not itself the divine, but it opens the participant to a personal experience of the divine. The flame on the altar, like the artwork, is a threshold object: its purpose is to catalyse a subjective passage from one state of awareness to another.
Considering light as threshold allows us to appreciate a certain unity between aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual ways of knowing. The French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard wrote of reverie, a poetic sort of contemplation, as a state in which one can inhabit the border between reality and imagination. A ray of afternoon light catching dust in its beam might trigger just such a reverie: a moment of pause where one senses the richness of the now and the near-transcendent within the ordinary. In that dust-filled ray, the cosmic (sunlight from 93 million miles away) meets the intimate (the room we occupy) in a silent communion. The threshold is right there in the air. Likewise, in front of a Mark Rothko painting of hovering luminescent colours, or inside a James Turrell Skyspace chamber watching the twilight sky, viewers often report a feeling of meditative stillness or epiphany, as if the light-filled scene before their eyes has opened a door to something inward and ineffable. It is not necessary to label that “something” in religious terms; what matters is that light, carefully attended to, has led to an awareness, a threshold consciousness.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
TONY ROBINS: FLOWERS OF RESISTANCE
Exhibition on through August 9th, 2025.
