By Marc Gafni
Artist Claudia Kleefeld is not the first person to see the symbol of the spiral as being a portal to a vision of a coherent cosmos. She is original in that she is a first-rate, old-master-style artist with thirty years of training, who paints the spiral as an expression of an Eros of certainty that asserts the utter meaningfulness, depth, and order of the cosmos. Kleefeld’s paintings emerge from her own opened eye of the spirit and speak directly to the higher spiritual intuition of her viewers. Finally, Kleefeld is unusual in that she is part of an emergent form of art, which seeks to reveal the enchantment of a cosmos ”” a cosmos that is good, true, and beautiful.
I am delighted to present an article which celebrates the work of Claudia Kleefeld, one of the brightest shining lights in the universe of art today. My new article, “Post-postmodern Art: A Return to Belonging,” is now published in the latest issue of Parabola Magazine.
At the heart of the article, I explain how Kleefeld’s design ”” the spiral in particular ”” seek to qualify the universe:
Enter Claudia Kleefeld with her postpostmodern art, an authentic expression of its era. Kleefeld is very much in rebellion against modern art and its deconstructions. The spiral, as it appears in all facets of existence, is her holy grail and through linking all of the spirals that appear in every dimension of existence, she seeks to rebuild Yeats’s lost ladder. What is crucial is that she does not do so in a regressive manner but rather through powerful, evolutionary movement. Kleefeld’s art is inspired by the unified order of all things, seeking to remind us that we are not strangers in the universe. She writes, “I am working on understanding the mechanics of the Universe as seen through the Spiral in order to help us experience our belonging and a sense of our interconnectivity of all parts with the whole.”
What is critical is that Kleefeld’s art and texts are entirely post-traditional, post-dogmatic, postmetaphysical, and even post-scientific in a limited sense of the term. She has subliminally incorporated the modern and postmodern critique of religion. Her consciousness is clearly world-centric at a minimum, and possibly cosmocentric. The spiral in Kleefeld’s art becomes a symbol for the post-metaphysical possibility of discerning patterns that connect. The Eros, the essential wholeness of reality, is alluded to in the spiral, which appears in and animates all spheres of reality and knowledge. Kleefeld captures this in an image of books from different disciplines that find right balance in the magic of the eternal form.
To read the article, visit the Parabola website or click here to download it:
