Venice is always crowded with tourists, but during the period that the Biennale is held, it swells even more. As many as 320,000 visitors attend the Biennale, and with all the associated events and exhibits scattered throughout the city, many free of charge, the numbers of art enthusiasts who are drawn to the city during its tenure is surely larger. Making my way, therefore, through the crowded “streets” in the August heat required considerable finesse and no small amount of patience. Arriving at the Palazzo Bollani, the site of Adi Da’s exhibit, which is not far from Piazza San Marco, Venice’s main square, I entered the cool, darkened foyer with a mixture of relief and anticipation.

What I encountered in the entry was not merely a welcome respite from chaotic tourism. It was part of a meticulously crafted stage set, or environment, in which to view the artwork. Adi Da, I learned, gives a lot of consideration to the circumstances in which his work is seen. He says that “any environment in which the art I make and do is exhibited should be a truly (and not merely ‘officially’) ‘sacred enclosure’ (or a unique comprehensive environment . . .).* He wants to “surround people with art, to bring them into a space that is the art-work I make.” The walls of the main exhibition rooms, one flight up a narrow staircase, had been sheathed in black, covering all windows and creating a “black box” in which the work was installed. The first impact was of dazzling color, seemingly glowing from within.

The individual pieces are monumental in size and this, too, is intentional. “My images are not merely intellectual images. They are not merely ‘mind-sized’ or ‘head-sized.’. . . My art is beyond your own scale. You cannot put it in your hand. You cannot fit it into your mind. You have to deal with it.”

I chose to deal with it by getting an overall sense of the exhibit: three modest-sized rooms, three or four works in each room, a total of ten “fabrications,” one of which was an LCD screen that immediately pulled me in. I spent a bit of time at the screen and was quickly immersed in its mesmerizing images, but I decided to begin at the beginning while making a mental note to allow plenty of time for that installation.

The first room is dominated by the horizontal reach of a piece entitled Alberti’s Window, a radiant profusion of geometric shapes of bright, saturated color battened down by regularly spaced verticals. Their spacing, I later learned, referenced the upright members of the sliding glass door, with sidelights, in Adi Da’s studio on the Fijian island where he lives. There are seven of these “windows” in the mural-like piece, each documenting the changing light over the course of a day and, simultaneously, over the course of a week. Light is a central theme in Adi Da’s work. He explains, “My images are created to be a means for any and every perceiving, feeling, and fully participating viewer to ‘Locate’ Fundamental and Really Perfect Light—the world As Light, all relations As Light, conditional (or naturally perceived) light As Absolute Light.”

The quality of light in a work in the second room caught my eye. Entitled Quandra Contemplating the Fruits of Perfect Knowledge, this kaleidoscopic collage is built on an azure blue field, the color of the sky on a sunny day. Though hung parallel to the plane of the wall, the piece opens onto what looks like infinity, as if one were gazing up into the heavens. Peering up at Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel or the trompe l’oeil ceiling frescoes of Baroque painters such as Guido Reni came to mind. Quandra is the main female character in Adi Da’s allegory The Mummery Book—his name for the beloved, the beautiful lover, the “other.” Many of the images are individually recognizable as a pear or a mango, a woman’s face or an arm, yet they are assembled in such a way that they are subsumed by the geometry of the field in which they lie.

Two other works in this room consist of composite images and are from the Spectra Suite (spectra as in spectrum of color). Other images, such as a leg or a lute, are recognizable, and the palette of strong, clear color is the same. The Pastimes of Narcissus deals with a theme that has engaged Adi Da since his days as a young man fresh out of college when he “had located the source of suffering and misadventure in myself and recognized it as the pattern and drama of Narcissus.” Narcissus is the Greek god who was condemned to contemplate his own reflection eternally and signified for Adi Da the state of separation and self-absorption that constitutes “ordinary consciousness.” “I sought an encounter with Reality that would release me from Narcissus,” a pursuit that monopolized Adi Da’s life until the age of thirty when he underwent what he calls “my Divine re-Awakening.”

The other multiple-image piece in this room, The Room Itself Is the Only Witness to the Three Common States, has a chair floating in the wide girth of the white border that surrounds the central image. The chair, in Adi Da’s lexicon, is the seat of consciousness, and the room indicates the space and the condition of nonduality, where subject and object are one. The fourth piece has only a single image—an unadorned straight-backed chair—several of which are placed in simple room-like spaces defined by broad bands of rainbow color, the “fundamental room of human awareness” in Adi Da’s symbolism.

The third room contains the riveting sequence of 899 images projected on the LCD screen, a veritable twenty-first-century mandala. After checking out the companion works in this smallest of the exhibition rooms—works that elaborate the same visual ideas of the geometric shapes that constitute the screen’s unfolding imagery—I gave myself over to the meditative allure of the screen and quickly entered a state of visual bliss.

*All quotes are presented as they appear in Adi Da’s writings.