Barnett Newman — Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Red. A field more than five meters wide is filled with red, crossed by a few narrow vertical bands.

Newman called these lines “zips.” They were not decoration or partition, but marks of existence declaring, within an immense field of color, “Here I am.”

At close range, red covers the surrounding vision, and the verticals stand like human beings. The sublime is no longer a distant mountain or storm; it becomes the viewer’s awareness of scale and presence before color.

Byun Shi-Ji’s paintings also place a small dark vertical upon a wide field of dried-grass color. It is a person. Yet the line is not straight; it bends. There is no wind in Newman’s field, while Byun’s field contains almost nothing but wind.

If standing straight is sublime, what should we call remaining upright while bent? Byun’s line is not heroic. It simply does not fall.

The lines within the red are still standing.