The 1757 publication of Edmund Burke’s A philosophical Investigation into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful helped to initiate a radical transformation in human thought. For millennia, artists, writers, philosophers and theologians had sought to articulate those realities they believed lay outside human experience and comprehension. The sublime was the space of gods and ideal forms, made visible in sculptures and paintings that transcended the limits of physical reality and appearances and gave form to the intangible and made visible the invisible. For many, Beauty was the bridge that crossed the divide between the seen and unseen, with the ‘ideals’ of divine proportion glimpsed in beautiful things and beautiful forms.
Burke’s proposal was radically different. Beauty became an aesthetic category, ascribed to a pleasing form. It was seen as the opposite of ugliness rather than a moment of divine revelation or the imitation of a universal ideal. The sublime was no longer an objective reality existing ‘out there’,
but a subjective, interior attitude of the individual; a feeling of terror or incomprehension before the infinite, existing in the mind of the beholder. Paintings by Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W Turner reflected this change. They captured states of mind and revealed the
places that evoked these feelings: vertiginous mountains, dense forests, limitless seas, icebergs and intense storms. But in the end, they could never really capture the sublime’s true formlessness and infinite potential.
In the twentieth century, as western artists moved beyond the imitation of physical form into abstraction, the painting itself became a sublime space, with colour field paintings by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman drawing the viewer into visual encounters where the gaze gets lost and time stands still. But these works are still concerned with provoking the feeling and eliciting an individual response.
Tom Lomax’s digital paintings and sculptures share many of the characteristics of these abstract encounters with the sublime. They delight, beguile and tease the eye with colour spaces that seem to hover on the boundary between solidity and immateriality. We find ourselves tumbling into
fathomless depths as we trace lines whose solidity melts before our gaze. Edges blur, points disappear, forms expand and contract, prompting our breathing to slow, our pupils to widen in wonder and the edges of our body to dissolve into the space around them. For Lomax’s works not only provoke a response; their lustrous, smooth digital surfaces made up of millions of pixels and pin-pricks of ink make visible that atomic space where the hard edges that seem to both separate and contain are in reality porous, fluid boundaries, and where the material and immaterial world are separated only by a different density of molecules.

Lomax’s fields of colour take us to the space between form and formlessness, the point when the invisible becomes visible and when objective light becomes subjective colour. As a point erupts, a line emerges, a space opens up, a solid form appears, before dissolving back into that anonymous,
insubstantial space of colour where nothing is solid and the gaze falls away. Lomax shows us what was lost after Burke, the space where beauty is not just form, but that moment of emergence when form emerges from the immateriality of the sublime. As his two dimensional paintings become three
dimensional sculptures become two dimensional paintings, we find ourselves drawn into the universe’s atomic dance: that space of sublime encounter on the cusp of being, becoming and dissolution.