Olga Dema, 2025
My abstract icons are born on the threshold where the visible meets the invisible, in the place where the immanent and the transcendent, the temporal and the eternal touch and open toward one another.
Each work is an attempt to make perceptible what has no form yet carries presence: the subtle breath of the invisible, becoming visible through light, colour, and matter.
Gold as the Language of the Invisible
Drawing on the Byzantine tradition, I reinterpret the icon not as an image but as a phenomenological space of encounter – a point where the immaterial descends into matter and takes on form in order to be perceived.
An icon is not a painting but an event of revelation: a window through which the invisible breathes into the visible.
According to the canon, the background of an icon is light, and it is painted with gold; pigments describe the earthly reality.
Gold and pigment belong to different optical spheres: pigment is the body of the world, gold its breath.
As Pavel Florensky wrote, the icon is a “window” through which divine light descends to earth. In icon painting, gold is not an ornament but the light of spiritual reality itself, a substance of being, inaccessible to the senses.
It does not reflect; it reveals.
In it, perspective and shadow disappear, leaving pure, timeless being, visible to the heart.
Gold is the image of the invisible side of the visible, the divine energy that permeates all existence. It shines from within, revealing that infinity is hidden in matter.
Gold thus becomes the medium through which the invisible becomes visible.
The task of the icon is not only to distinguish worlds but to reveal their contact. Where pigment meets gilding, a threshold arises: the visible is inscribed within the invisible, as form within the field of light. Gold therefore surrounds the figure not as a “background” but as an ocean of light in which all things dwell; pigment is its tangible surface.
Across cultures, gold connects humanity with the eternal: for the Greeks, it signified divinity and immortality; in Egypt, it was the “metal of the gods,” the radiance of Ra; in India, it was the light of Surya – wisdom and abundance.
Everywhere it shines the same: in temples and in dust, gold remains not merely a material but a language of the invisible, a stable image of presence.
From Light to Colour
Yet light is not only gold. Throughout the history of art, there has always been another path to the immaterial – the path of colour.
If gold embodies light as manifestation, blue discloses it as depth.
Blue is the colour of the heavens, of silence, of boundless stillness. In Byzantine iconography it is the colour of the Virgin and of the Spirit: it does not shine outward but draws the gaze inward, into contemplation.
It was precisely this inner dimension of light that Yves Klein revealed centuries later. His International Klein Blue became a space of pure sensibility – without figure, horizon, or shadow.
The viewer ceases to see the surface and sinks into the depth of the immaterial. Klein believed that in blue, the material dissolves, giving way to pure perception.
Unlike gold, which affirms presence, blue invites dissolution, a passage into infinity. Gold is light that appears; blue is light that absorbs. One blinds, the other pacifies; one asserts being, the other its mystery.
Hence their kinship: in Klein’s work, International Klein Blue “in some way imitates the qualities of gold” – its stability, rarity, and preciousness, remaining a metaphor of divine light that does not lose its radiance upon touching the earthly. The rounded corners of his monochromes emphasise the boundlessness of the field.
Thus, blue and gold echo one another as two breaths of the same sky: brilliance and silence; not opposites, but two movements of light – outward and inward, revelation and contemplation.
The Boundary Where Matter Becomes Light
My own works are born precisely on this boundary between dazzling and immersion, between appearing and vanishing.
I combine ancient and contemporary techniques: gold leaf, pigments, textures, photographs, digital traces.
These materials hold two orders of reality – the earthly and the immaterial – and the trembling line between them, where they begin to resonate with each other.
Along this line, the invisible becomes visible: spirit descends into matter, and matter begins to shine from within.
The gilded field around the figure is not a frame but a medium of presence, an ocean of light from which the image rises and to which it returns.
The canonical sequence itself is essential: gilding comes first, then the forms are gradually illuminated by layers, as if the image truly emerged from light.
This makes the technique not a craft but an ontology: a movement from nothingness to manifestation, where each subsequent layer adds clarity of being.
For me, art is not a way of depicting the sacred but a way of participating in it. It is not representation but co-presence.
When I paint, I do not create an image, I listen to how light changes its breath.
Each layer of pigment, each fragment of gold, each reflection of blue is part of a single act: an attempt to reveal the immaterial within the material, the infinite within the finite.
Art as the Breath of the Invisible
The Invisible Made Visible is not only the theme of my art but its inner gesture.
It is the moment when art ceases to be form and becomes revelation: when the gaze no longer sees an object but feels presence; when colour not only describes, but begins to breathe.
Here the countenance is born, not as resemblance, but as the manifested presence of an idea, its ontology.
Hence the ancient connection between the face and eidos / idea – the image as testimony of the archetype.
It is there that I wish to remain: on the threshold where light becomes matter, and matter once again becomes light.