Painting with light, writing with pictures

A white room, simply thought. Altar facing the rising sun, facing east. Murals: black lines on white tiles, like calligraphy: St. Dominic stands like a tree; Mary, flowering from the stem of Jesse standing amidst the flowers of the meadow, holds the feminine in the place of God; and Christ’s rough-drawn ascent to the cross troubles the serenity all around. Windows: through perfect coloured glass nature falls as light onto the white, on to the quiet drama of the opposite walls; the blue of sky and sea, the green of plant life and the yellow of the sun. A rhythm of threes: three murals, three windows, three doors, three lights, three colours.

Matisse created the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, not far from Nice, at the end of the 1940s in the last four years of this life. Of it, he said:

I regard it, despite all its imperfections, as my masterpiece … as an effort which is the culmination of a whole life dedicated to the search for truth. What I have done in the chapel is to create a religious space… To take an enclosed space of very reduced proportions and give it, solely by the play of colours and lines, the dimensions of infinity.

To stand in the simple white room was to be in a cool, calm place even thought the air was sweltering; to watch the light was like watching a butterfly wing somehow suspended outside time. It did feel, as Matisse said, like the fulfillment of his life’s work. A work that required a religious setting even as it transcended it. The religious motifs on the white tiles become the site of the projection of the natural world, the movement of the sun, the passing of the days and seasons, the changing garden beyond the windows. The language of the chapel is the language of the natural world – sea, sky, sun, plants, deserts, flowers, stone – even St. Dominic tree-like and Mary in the midst of flowers – only the scenes of the crucifixion stand apart.

It recalls the Rothko chapel in Houston – Rothko having said that without Matisse’s Red Studio there would be no Rothko. Both chapels created by artists who operated beyond / without faith but the impact could not be more different. In Rothko’s, you confront the abyss, the nothing at the heart of things; sitting on low Japanese benches with the light filtering through the roof lights, your meditation is on the mysterious, groundlessness of existence. In the Vence chapel, in the dance of light, there is a delicate interplay of sky, earth, humankind and god, opening up a place, a moment that is greater than any of them, yet somehow dependent on them all.