Tacita Dean’s “Trial of the Finger”

That the first room of Tacita Dean’s latest show is the quietest seems fitting for an artist who habitually selects the slowest, most tortuous path to her creative destination. On display in this opening gallery are twelve of Dean’s chalk drawings on slate and chalkboard, as muted and ambiguous as the vapors rising from the stones of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (Dean traveled to the oracle in 1987 on an artist’s residency). Here, serpentine gestures ghost on the green-blue telluric surfaces of Dean’s found, mostly Victorian-era slates, some scribbled sparsely with barely decipherable words, dates, references, pensées—thoughts given whispered form. These drawings evoke many things: Medusa’s tangled mane of vipers, solar streaks, lightning, a contour of something that lies just beyond one’s ken, an impression pulled from an exhausted copper plate. The largest and most worked of these compositions—a chalk-on-blackboard tondo titled In Montem (he fell) (2026)—recalls her earlier, more indexical chalk drawings of clouds and mountains (Fatigues (E), 2012, etc.) but still resists legibility.

I am struck by how much this piece calls to mind the mid-nineteenth-century landscape paintings made in thrall to Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on the sublime: the drama of Philip James De Loutherbourg’s shipwrecks and avalanches, J.M.W. Turner’s broken clouds and gnashing waves, the menace of Joseph Wright of Derby’s volcanic eruptions. James Ward’s Gordale Scar (1814), a colossal, chiaroscuro depiction of a limestone cliff, is not unlike Dean’s earlier Chalk Fall (2018) in scale and subject—her monumental post-Brexit portrait of the collapsing cliffs of Dover. Enigmatic flashes of white chalk—like flares, or perhaps portals—appear in the eulogistic Navalny (2026) and A Cloud for Marian (2026) (the latter an homage to Dean’s recently deceased gallerist), a formal inverse of the black void that ruptures the surface of In Montem (he fell). Both speak poetically to the precarity of life, to the arbitrariness of its beginnings and endings, and to the vastness of what lies beyond.

If the feeling, leaving this gallery, is one of having tiptoed around the sublime, then walking into Dean’s Paradise (2021) gives the shocking impression of having plunged headlong into it. Set to a swirling classical score by Thomas Adès, the twenty-five-minute-long, 35 mm anamorphic abstract film is an astonishing work. In 2021, Dean was invited to design the sets and costumes for The Dante Project, a ballet commissioned by London’s Royal Opera House which travels with Dante and Virgil from the depths of hell, through purgatory, to the exalted third act of the Divine Comedy. For this, its Los Angeles debut, viewers must enter the blinding darkness of a small theater and brace for a visual experience unlike anything I can easily situate within the canon of art history. The film’s subject, if it can even be said to have one, might be described as color itself.

And, indeed, color is where Dean set out to develop the work, using William Blake’s palette for his illustrations of Dante’s trecento epic poem as her point of departure. Between 1824 and his death in 1827, Blake made 102 pencil and watercolor compositions to accompany a never-to-be-realized printed edition of Dante’s text. His unusual palette—marmoreal flesh tones, celestial chartreuses and maroons, turbid cobalts, vivid crimsons, etc.— but also the manner in which he visualized Dante’s conception of heaven—as a series of ascending celestial spheres culminating in a direct vision of God—guided Dean’s formal decisions (as did illustrations of Dante’s Empyrean by Gustave Doré and Botticelli). The dominant form is spherical, at turns a shield, an all-seeing eye, a planet, a portal, a crystal ball, a solar eclipse, a gold coin, a breast, a coil—though it shudders and shapeshifts, as lurid sunset colors coalesce and sublimate around it like the weather. It is nothing short of an ascension vortex, which—set to Adès’s sonic spiral in continuous crescendo—moves deliriously toward a state of spiritual and visual rapture. It is a masterpiece.

Dean’s approach to making this film was, as with so many of her projects, aleatoric in nature. It is her wont to partially blind the camera eye, to amplify the potential for chance associations within the same divided frame. How the images here (which is to say, color in flight) would sync and interact through the use of Dean’s intricate masking techniques, or how one color might dirty another in the layering of lighting gels, or simply what the light might do on a given day of shooting—all of it remains, by design, a mystery until the film comes back from the processor. As Dean herself has put it, “only the negative, deep within the darkness of the camera body, carries the secret to what has already been exposed on it.”1

Blindness is everywhere in Greek mythology—as punishment, as absolution, as wisdom, as ignorance—and is a concept that Dean extrapolates, plays off of, inhabits in both her subjects and her methods. This interest centers on blindness as a liminal state. Liminality is a feature of so much of Dean’s work—a stretch of patient, blind waiting must almost always be endured before it can be determined if all the effort amounted to anything. So it seems natural that she chased the solar eclipse, a phenomenon that carries with it the risk of permanent blindness, across Wyoming for her film Antigone (2018). But it’s also fitting that, after passing through technical purgatory, she emerged in Paradise.