Foxx read Renaissance painting as a Gnostic encounter with light rather than Christian suffering

Evidence

There is a clear Gnostic dimension to this. For the Gnostics, the World was both heavy and dark, and you got a glimpse of the Outside through glimmers and shimmers (two recurrent words in Foxx’s vocabulary). Around the time of Systems of Romance, Foxx’s cover art shifted from harsh Warhol/Heartfield cut/paste towards gentle detournements of Renaissance paintings. What Foxx appeared to discover in Da Vinci and Botticelli is a Catholicism divested not only of pagan carnality but of the suffering figure of Christ, and returned to an impersonal Gnostic encounter with radiance and luminescence. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to chapter 10’s Gnostic reading of structural darkness in Peace’s Yorkshire, and the Alien-God later in this same chapter — Foxx inverts the Gnostic dark into Gnostic light. — connects to: The numinous can be decoupled from religion and experienced as alien tranquillity — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 359
• SEED: The claim that postmodern culture suppresses the Light, not the Dark, and that the angelic is embarrassing while the demonic is cool, could anchor an essay on the aesthetics of optimism and why serene joy reads as kitsch.