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A Kabbalist, mystic, and extraordinary artist, Smith’s drawings are vibrant, esoteric, beautiful, and inspired diagrams that hearken back to the tradition of alchemical art of the seventeenth century. While invoking memories of such amazing drawings, his work also goes beyond and extends this tradition.
David Chaim Smith is unstuck in time. David Chaim Smith makes drawings… They are incandescent utterances from the nexus point of unutterable ecstasy. They are inchoate maps of the un-mappable places of Original Creation. Is it dangerous to document these things? Yes it is. Throughout the history of Man it has been dangerous for the Mediators between Tangible and Intangible to absorb and expose Esoteric Teachings… There is nothing New Age about this mysticism. It isn’t at all user-friendly. These intricate beautifully rendered chart-like drawings compel you to give up your own time frames and become absorbed and changed. The images settle into your psyche as well as your aesthetic reference zone. But for some reason these involved mad dances through words and sacred geometries, biomorphic and astral thought forms, incantations and exhortations are not in the least solipsistic…
New York-based artist that creates massive pencil-and-paper artworks inspired by the Qabalah, the Hebrew system of understanding the divine through numbers and letters. His works go far beyond the standard Tree of Life diagram you’ll find in nearly any occult book, sourcing both orthodox Rabbinical texts and an almost Cronenbergian “body horror” that turns the Tree into living biology. For more, check out his magnum opus “The Sacrificial Universe” from Fulgur Press (the above image is from that book), his commentary on Genesis 1-2 “The Kabbalistic Mirror of Genesis”—which will also be published in a more affordable paperback from Inner Traditions this Fall.
