Love can often be mistaken for wanting to be consumed by another person. Here I am

talking about the idea of love as a kind enmeshment that is so complete that someone can feel a cavernous internal sense of longing that ricochets off their intestinal walls – a longing so profound that it involves becoming a vessel of sorts, a container for pure love. To achieve this, you have to start from something empty, something that was someone, which is made to be vacant. In this sense, we could say that self-annihilation and love then share some common ground. In this model, love is to become a receptacle or a receiver. This feeling is kenosis.

Kenosis is the sacrificial exercise of self-emptying, purging one’s desires to make room for the divine. Making oneself empty to be full of perfect love. Jesus supposedly performed this in the book of Philippians, proving that, although he was the son of God, he harbored desires and was imperfectly human. Like you. Like me. But kenosis is hard to come by in the secular world. These materialistic methods of kenosis, like laxative dependency, binging disorder, and romantic co-dependency, wane quickly in their effectiveness, but one artist has found a way to make it sustain. This is Erik ReeL.

In the past several years of a decades long career, ReeL has developed the practice of kenosis in the realm of painting; first in 2018 by draining his works of figurative elements in an attempt to overcome Western obsession with materialism, and now he has gone a step further, in his first show in the Pacific Northwest in thirty-six years. In the exhibition, What’s So Lovely About the End of the World? (WSLATEOTW?) his maximalist compositions offer us a view of

what a kenotic state feels like from the inside once we begin to feel our way into the abstract canvases.

The curator's statement about the exhibition, declares that “The beauty of life allows us to keep learning, to keep creating and engaging in the arts, to keep absorbing beauty around us ... while fighting the destructive headwinds of a dying earth”, and prompts us to consider what role art play. “Can the beauty of art and the consciousness of artists negate the power of the apocalypse?” (WSLATEOTW?). It is here that ReeL’s perspective has a certain resonance with the insights of ecological philosopher, Timothy Morton, who has argued that ecological information dumps aren’t going to stop global warming. This is because we may already be living in a period known as the sixth great mass extinction, or the Anthropocene, which is already aghast in the “headwinds of a dying earth.”

For Morton and ReeL, the task isn’t to prevent an apocalypse, but to figure out how to be alive in one. Where they differ however is in why that they each call for a shift in consciousness. ReeL believes Kenosis can help us achieve this by exhausting the anxious and obsessive desire to prevent what is already in motion whereas Morton proposes an attitude of tuning to the present, or an abundant awareness of the “sensuous existence of other lifeforms.[1] As such, Kenosis is letting go while keeping illusion of agency intact. Both positions rely on a sense of permission to embrace a Bodhisattva-like acceptance of The End, but for Morton this is forced upon us, whereas for ReeL, Kenosis is not just surrender, but a kind of divine surrender from within.

ReeL understands this dialectic intimately. The forty pieces on display at PLACE, an international architectural design firm located in Northwest Portland, present a record of psychic kinesthesia. A painting like Burning by a Bright Star (2023) plays with the tension between percussive lines and looming shapes. In it, we find thin gestural white lines that look like rungs in a ladder, organically organized across Pepto-pink oblong forms and a landscape of deep green that grows outward from the edges. Overlain with fleshy tones, they could be keloids of suture scars, or the remnants of being impaled by wheel spokes in a freak bike accident. One pink form droops down, forming a gentle arc that leads the viewers eye into the lower left visual field. This part is a recognizable sex organ, which is distinctly human, but which remains somewhat obscure too. It is something like a nudge that we are concerned with a state of embodiment throughout the exhibition.

After all, Kenosis is supposed to strip away human desire, but human desire finds a strong presence in this composition. The sense of kinesthesia that informs a work like Burning by a Bright Star isn’t due to the juxtaposition of erogenous elements, rather it’s created by the rigorous cleansing of its sexual connotations. Bright spots of molten red and orange dominate the composition are subdued by an enveloping hue of sea-green, which acts as something like a visual counter-balance.

Another piece that commands careful contemplation is Viva Ukraine (2023). While its title is obviously political, the work takes a radical turn away from the subtlety of formalist abstraction which dominates the rest of the exhibition. The colors and repetitive white marks seem strikingly similar to Burning by a Bright Star, but in this iteration, the strokes appear to be much more scattered and frantic – kinetic even. All this movement does is create a fast-paced sense of action, and the message of the work certainly depends on it. Otherwise, the text in all caps would feel entirely overstated, and perhaps even a bit hostile.

Instead, it suggests—rather forcefully—that the message imposed is not to be questioned. It’s in this piece where ReeL’s kenosis divulges a specific sense of intent—and that is to empty yourself of one thing and replace it with something else, this work perhaps. It isn’t necessarily an ill-intentioned move in this political climate, but rather, it works it expose a critical imperative that many viewers might miss if they weren’t a bit more familiar with the painter’s personal commitments, which are copious and quite esoteric.

Much like ReeL, the theosophist Annie Bessant could not afford to be too trusting of how an “average mind” handled their own thoughts irresponsibly. This was probably best articulated in Annie Bessant and C.W. Leadbeater’s book, Thought-Forms, which presented a number of visual representations that posited a relationship between of thoughts, emotions, colors, and shapes. Bessant and Leadbeater regarded themselves as clairvoyants who could not only read people’s thoughts but see them. In this way, they developed a system for categorizing thoughts by their effects and affects on the mental and astral bodies, which are most deeply connected to thought-forms out of the three bodies (the third being the physical body) in theosophical teachings.[2] The particular project not only sought to evidence the existence of clairvoyance but to demonstrate how one person’s thoughts and emotions could resonate with, and even inside others, and none of this has been lost on ReeL.

This is because Bessant and Leadbeater wanted to "[give] a moral lesson to every reader, making him realize the nature and power of his thoughts, acting as a stimulus to the noble, a curb on the base.” Meaning, they strived for the betterment of mankind on principles of race, class, and gender equality. Bessant not only had a spiritual mission but a political one as a prolific writer of women’s liberation at the turn of the 20th century. For all of her ambition to influence the world around her to embrace higher aspirations, Bessant also believed that a person could “pour out from himself vibrations which tend to stir up thought at a similar level in others.” This is a gesture towards the kind of kenosis that ReeL seeks too.