A Fragile Unity

by Fr. Paul Anel 

My first encounter with Gael Mooney’s work was with her 2011-2012 Portrait of a Gisant, (Charlemagne I), Saint-Denis Basilica, which was part of a group show at Bowery gallery. As I looked at the painting, at first it appeared chaotic and somewhat cryptic, like a coded message. I could make sense of some of the elements, such as a geometric structure in what appeared to be the background, but these elements, like the scattered isolated clusters of pieces to a puzzle, remained disconnected, and failed to coalesce into a figure. I could have walked away, but something begged me to stay, something frail but profound, like the whispering voice of a dying man in a hospital bed.  I decided to stay, and to listen.

What happened next was an experience I would compare to those three-dimensional pictures I played with as a child: when you stare at them long enough, a figure eventually pops out from a nondescript, pixelized background. As I looked at the painting patiently, searchingly, the figure of the gisant slowly composed itself, slowly emerged from the scattered specks of color: the still chest, the chin, the cheekbones, the crown, the pillow of stone. There was one major difference from the childhood memory I referred to, though: what happened then before me — or in me — was not an optical illusion.

If you take a picture of a man lying on a bed with his eyes half closed, it might be impossible to tell whether the man is falling asleep or waking up. Gael Mooney’s gisants have something of that « in-between » ambiguity. They stand (or, rather, lie) at the frontier between life and death, figuration and abstraction. Is the figure emerging from the chaos, or returning to it? Is the ray of light falling on the stone the promise of a new day, or the dying light of an old one, when night is about to take over the Saint-Denis Basilica? The answer to that question, one way or the other, depends on us.

The gisants — the actual sculptures in the basilica of Saint Denis — strike us with their modesty. They have none of the grandeur one would expect from the tombs of kings, and there is a reason for that. These kings and queens have passed on to a realm where none of their former power and glory matters anymore. They have rejoined the ranks of our common humanity: they are but departed souls in need of our prayers. These sculptures are not « complete », as a celebratory monument would be. They call for our empathy. They beg us to intercede for them. Likewise, Gael Mooney’s paintings are made complete in the viewer’s gaze. They beg for our presence and active engagement with them in order for the figure to emerge from chaos and come to life. Our gaze completes them.

The fragile unity of Gael Mooney’s gisants is held together, or deconstructed, in our gaze. Like a sick man whose destiny depends upon his nurse’s presence and care, it is up to us to to bring them back to life. They expect from us something we are no longer used to offering it seems: silence and patience. The very silence and patience that were the artist’s as she stood in the basilica, recording with her brush the slow caress of light on the tombs of the ancient kings and queens.

Essay published in the exhibition catalog Gael Mooney:  Becoming Light: Gisants and Trees, The Studley Press, 2023.

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Father Paul Anel is a priest of the diocese of Brooklyn. A lover of the arts, he ministers to artists in New York City. He wrote on the relationship between art and faith for publications such as Magnificat, Image Magazine and Artcritical.com.