Victor Sabbatini – Alexander Reitman’s Divine Light

 The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Letters to the Seer”

I

Entering Alexander Reitman’s studio-cubicle, located on the top floor of Colby’s art department, my eyes were immediately drawn to the pile of books framing the painter’s working space; splayed over a paint-splattered table, their hidden content could only be glimpsed. A Madonna rendered in the maniera greca by Simone Martini peaked under the glossy folds of the artist’s monograph, whilst the sinuous vines and diaphanous figures of Viennese Secessionist Koloman Moser seemed to branch out of a facsimile of Ver Sacrum, the movement’s art and literature magazine. An accretion of the past, stashed and scattered around the artist’s tools—pencils, brushes, oil paints, sketches, and studies—these books seemed like gateways into Alex’s brain, open doors into his creative process.

In his Philobiblon, or A Treatise on the Love of Books, the 14th-century English bishop Richard de Bury delights in the fact that books are like thresholds into ethereal spheres. For Bury, in and through books “the soul of the student may ascend and look around from pole to pole, from the setting sun, from the sun, and from the sea”. Books are the locus of ever-expansive realms, where “the nature of celestial, terrestrial, and infernal beings is laid open.” Allow me the anachronism here, for I think it is constitutive of Reitman’s aesthetic elaboration. As Bury concedes, a book (and especially a picture book) is a threshold into a dream reality, a realm of pure sensuous fantasy. Those cluttered around an active Reitman, deep in work, constitute the scaffold of an art that relishes in the reference, in the nod and summoning of symbols and motifs for the elaboration of a mythopoetic visual space.

Like treasures of past visions, these books bear the testament of artists once struck by the frenzy of artistic imagination—visions plundered by an impish Reitman, Prometheus-like, in a quest for his own personal universe.

II

The two paintings Alexander Reitman showed at the 2026 Colby College Senior Art show, where he was awarded the President’s Prize for Excellence in the Studio Art Major, bear testament to work that is both self-mythologizing, yet intrinsically personal: his visual language, rendered on the canvas with masterful skill, is at once universal and particular, symbolic yet intimate. Reitman’s pictorial vocabulary is imbued with a sort of heteroglossic quality, where signs and symbols come to signify various things simultaneously.

Take The Apotheosis of God Emperor Iksandar Raymond, a sublimated “portrait” of the artist, which was the first out of the two works he painted during his senior year. The almost life-size figure, which bears a strong resemblance to the artist, is depicted in dramatic shades of blue—royal, lapis, and cerulean. The three-armed youth is posed in a manner reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s hyper-stylized self-portraits, with emaciated limbs and elongated neck outstretched to the outer edges of the canvas; yet the hands are posed in mudras, the traditional ritual gestures of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. A hybrid deity, Reitman’s blue youth seems to me like the visual equivalent of what Rimbaud deemed to be the poet’s task: the introspective reach into one’s innermost unconscious to yield new “ideas and forms” which, by task of their novelty, provoke a “long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses.” The light of the creative mind highjacks meaning and suspends time and space. It breaks with reality, flips it over its head to offer new and expansive territories.

Reitman’s paintings offer us the “tremendous spectacle” of the mind’s eye that French Surrealist André Breton so longed for. In Surrealism and Painting (1928), Breton championed for the painted image to become a “window” into the depths of our imagination; the artist is a “guide” who, by way of art and skill, navigates the agitated flows of the mind. Suspending disbelief, transcending the real and the fictitious, the painter must advance “deep into unknown territory, bearing rays of light in each hand.” Like Prometheus, the painter must steal the fire of creativity and translate it into visual form.

III

Light is central to Reitman’s work; both metaphorical and literal, light seeps through both canvases with an intensity and materiality that opens up the work, making it a site of critical reciprocity between artist and viewer. In The Apotheosis of God Emperor Iksandar Raymond, the duplicity of Reitman’s light is marked by both Iksandar’s halo, which signifies his ascent into apotheosis, and the glimmering light of the gold leaf. Framed by an elongated, mirror-like semicircle, the effect of this inlay of gold is twofold: it imbues the painting with a source of light emanating directly from within the picture’s frame and invites the viewer to step into the scene by obfuscating its specificities. This golden area, which both refracts and reflects (artificial) light, creates a threshold within the panting: it suspends time and dematerializes space, making the scene one of perpetual imagining, a non-lieux (or non-place, to riff off anthropologist Marc Augé’s term), which transcends specific context.

The use of gold to create a universalizing, all-embracing image recurs throughout Western art. Early Byzantine mosaics, like the image of Empress Theodora and Her Attendants in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, use gold as a means of creating a space at once dramatically synesthetic and atemporal. The 6th-century, haloed empress and her richly-clad attendees seem to float in space, an abstract golden setting freezing the procession for all eternity. Note that Byzantine mosaics were a major source of inspiration for the Viennese Secessionist Gustav Klimt, who drew heavily from their ornamental opulence in his portraits of Vienna’s socialites—the most poignant example being his 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which happens to be Reitman’s favorite work of art.

Jumping to the Netherlandish Renaissance, Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross offers a poignant vision of the aftermath of Christ’s Passion. No atmospheric perspective, no receding landscape: just the compassion-inducing image of a dead Christ, surrounded by his sorrowful followers. Placed against a gold and shallow background, the figures project into the viewer’s space, freezing the scene for eternity. The Ascension of Crown Prince Iksandar, by Decree of Empress Daena Raymon, Reitman’s second painting, bears similarities with van der Weyden’s Descent: but instead of a descent, it offers Iksandar’s ascent, one effected by way of light.

For Reitman, light imbues his paintings with the flicker of the mental image, while it becomes the driving force for metamorphic ascension. In The Ascension (painted after the Apotheosis yet meant to be read as its precursor), the orb that Iksandar holds transforms him into an ethereal Crown Prince. Just like Reitman’s brushes, which allow him to transcend the limits of space and time by way of art, creating his own phantasmagorical land of play, the orb is the tool, the icon of experience. It is the fire which, stolen by the poet in his attempt for novelty, shines through the images and strikes the viewer’s senses—beckoning him to see the light.

 

References

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso Books, 2020.

Breton, André. Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson, introduction Mark Polizzotti. Boston: MFA Publications, 2002. (Quotes on pages 3 and 5.)

Bury, Richard de, 1287–1345 and Thomas, E. C. (Ernest Chester), 1850–92. Philobiblon / [by] Richard de Bury: The text and translation of E. C. Thomas, edited with a foreword by Michael Maclagan. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1960. (Quotes on page 8.)

Rimbaud, Arthur. “Letters to the Seer.” In Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. (Quotes on pages 101–3.)

 

Acknowledgments

I dedicate this essay to Véronique Plesch, for her perpetual support and encouragement in all I undertake. I also wish to thank Alexander Reitman, whose work led me to write this essay in the first place.