Sacred Art: Creation and Symbolism

Stained glass windows are meant for a church or for a profane building.
It is hence either sacred or profane. Using the same writing style for both is a fundamental mistake and hence, a complete mix-up as regards the aim.

The profane stained glass windows can be self-sufficient as decorative elements. It is not what the Church seeks. The stained glass window of a church cannot confine itself within the play of virtuoso techniques. It must send forth and irradiate a mystical intensity comparable to the emotion carried within the artist. It is in this regard that the stained glass works of the 18th and 19th Centuries are nothing but a sheer, blatant failure. For they can be of interest to archeologists but not to the believers. Still and up till now, many a person thinks that the mere fact of painting a biblical character is definitely sufficient to bring forth a sacred image.
What is necessary is to possess what the people of the Middle Ages had and lacks in us: the absolute ands total meaning of the sacred. We, very often, mix between the image of a saint in ecstasy and that of a saint in a fainting fit, for instance. We are making a representation of the Saint Sulpice Style, nothing but a representation that even lacks the technique. We no longer speak Aramean, Latin and Ancient Greek; is it for that reason that we no longer understand Christ's message? In sacred art, let us then use a contemporary language, a contemporary writing and a modern style.

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I deem it necessary that stained glass windows be an elevation for both soul and mind. If it fails to achieve this, it is hence a failure for them and a frustration for me. In fact, a stained glass window does not have to please me, I mean to say, by its plastic artistic shape. It only has to help me rise above the restrictions and barriers of the real in order to reach the superhuman, i.e. to reach God.

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