Leaving Palazzo Bollani—palazzo refers to a building, usually urban, but not necessarily a palace as we Anglophones often mistakenly assume—I was surprised to discover nearly two hours had elapsed. In my history of going to art exhibits, I can usually get the gist of a show fairly quickly; twenty minutes for such a small one would usually suffice. Clearly, something different was going on this time.

For sure, I was able to place Adi Da’s work in the context of twentieth-century art history. I could see his indebtedness to Modernism. The tubular appendages of the figures in the two most recent works, for example, are distant relatives of Fernand Léger’s stylized humans. Or the syncopations of Alberti’s Window recalled American painter Stuart Davis’s boldly colored abstractions. His dependence on the structure of geometry and the freedom with color owe much to his Modernist predecessors, and the powerful physical presence of his work furthers the aspirations of the Russian Constructivist and Dutch De Stijl artists for “concrete” art. With the smallest work being more than 7.5 feet by 13 feet and Alberti’s Window exceeding 46 feet in length, the impact of the fabrications belies the fact that they consist of paper printed with pigmented inks mounted on aluminum substructures.

But there was more. Something else was coming through, and as intangible as it was, its power and implications are significant.

In his artist’s statement, Adi Da says, “My image-art is not (in any instance) merely a ‘something’ in and of itself, or an ‘objective something’ that has, in the conventional sense, ‘subjective’ meaning that only I can understand or know. My images are about how Reality Is (in and of and As Itself). . . .” Certainly, other modern artists have been interested in art’s capacity to convey the immaterial. Piet Mondrian, one of the first artists to paint a purely abstract painting at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote about the “mature” artist who “will be open to the universal and will tend more and more to unite with it.” And the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi proclaimed that “art is reality itself.” Yet what Adi Da is manifesting in his work goes significantly beyond these earlier realizations.

Adi Da writes a lot about point of view in relationship to the art he makes. “My image-art,” he says, “can be characterized as paradoxical space that undermines ‘point of view.’” He defines point of view as the “essence of ego-life,” that day-to-day awareness of our conditioned lives. He is not, like his Modernist forefathers, trying to go beyond the conventions of three-dimensional perspective by depicting multiple points of view. Rather, he is attempting to reveal experience without point of view altogether. He seeks to transmit that which is prior to all experience, in other words, the ground of experience itself.

That he is even attempting to do this via the manipulation of two-dimensional shapes on a flat surface is impressive. To create a “Self-Portrait of Reality Itself” with only color and shape is an audacious task. Brancusi said that “one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself by approaching the real sense of things.” What Adi Da is doing, though, is not really simple, either visually or metaphysically. His imagery is both highly complex, in terms of its composition and its execution, and startlingly pure, or uncomplicated, at the same time. Remarkably, he is attempting to transmit the totality of pure consciousness by means of the specificity of the manifest world—and he’s succeeding.

I read in Adi Da’s autobiography, The Knee of Listening, that he found, early on in his quest, his devotion to the images of the “heart’s mind” had been “replaced by a direct Realization of the Heart Itself.” That realization has come full circle, one could say, in the fact that he is now creating imagery himself of great beauty and power to stir the heart. His art—these stunning formidable fabrications—is not for the eyes alone. It operates on other levels and perhaps can even be transformative, as Adi Da intends. “I work to have the images serve the participant’s transformative participation in reality altogether, to draw the participant into sublimity.”

Sublime and beautiful are welcome qualities in today’s indifferent postmodern landscape. Adi Da rightfully says that beauty is a “human necessity.” He equates it with Reality and Truth itself. In fact, he goes so far as to state, “Mere (or pre-mental, and thought-free) perception Is an inherently sacred . . . event of Reality-participation.”

You may not become enlightened by viewing Adi Da’s artwork, but it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that you could have an encounter with profundity and meaning. In that place of “deepest aloneness” and silence that his carefully crafted visual environment induces, there is the possibility for a shift in consciousness to occur. As Mondrian once said, “If we cannot free ourselves, we can free our vision.” That’s what started me going to art exhibits in the first place—that vision of another world where the promise of a distant ideal becomes realized.