Jaden Dejesus Blango is a mixed media artist based in Durham, North Carolina.
Born and raised on Long Island, D.Blango grew up with regular trips into New York City, where he was heavily influenced by the resiliency of the artistic impulse. Seeing street tags on monumental brick buildings began his fascination with visual art. Following his departure from Long Island as a teenager, D.Blango exhibited his blooming creative work throughout South Texas. As an undergraduate, he presented research on the link between art and the metaphysical in contemporary culture, and joined the COLFA Academy of Undergraduate Research Associates while earning a BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio. In 2021 he was invited back to New York for an undergraduate residency with the New York Academy of Art as an Academy Scholar. In 2024 D.Blango was selected as the 2024-25 C. Eric Lincoln Fellow of Theology and the Arts at Duke University, where he earned his Master's in Theological studies.
D. Blango's creative and academic interests lie in the comingling of Philosophical Theology, Semiotics, and the Cognitive Psychology of the Imagination.
" The work I create is concerned with the theological and philosophical dimensions of two-dimensional space.
My practice acts as a mode of theological inquiry, wherein I contemplate and explore the God of Christianity in a distinctly visual light. In this way, the work does not simply paraphrase what my faith linguistically affirms, but insists on the role visuality itself lends to particular ways of knowing, thinking, and experiencing God. Through the marriage of representation and abstraction, figure and ground, I engage the issue of God/Human relationship through compositional symbolism, in order to introduce more beautiful questions for the spiritual life. I metabolize this faith through the contemplative dance of making, buttressed by an academic substructure not only in theology, but cognitive and philosophical psychology and world religion. This fusion is what theological inquiry means in the context of my practice.
The work itself takes on a trinitarian shape, and through the use of water, light, abstraction, drawing, and chance, the ministry to the imagination begins. By symbolizing God, the hypostasis – (the ground of reality itself) as the non-representational, colorful, and obtuse shapes of my practice, I make my first theological claim about God the Father. The figures within the picture, by virtue of the figure-ground principle of gestalt psychology, are then inextricably linked to this ground. I understand this within the framework of my practice as an analogy for the inseparable union of the ground and it’s outpouring into materiality (God the Son). Through the Spirit, we are invited into this dyad through beholding their relationship, a prayer of perception and attention
(God the Holy Spirit).
The philosophy of my practice is to offer the viewer an opportunity to encounter, contemplate, and imagine the extraordinary co-mingled with the quotidian. As I believe it is here, in-and-through the space of the imagination that we are, paradoxically, apprehended by God in the realest sense."
- Jaden
"Effort is grace in slow motion."
Mark Nepo
Theological Writing
Mental Aesthetics within the
Early Church
This essay seeks to investigate the role and function of the human imagination in the life and faith of the early church (300 -550CE). Beginning from Plato’s distinction between ἐπιστήμη (Knowledge) and δόξα (Opinion), this essay follows the influence Plato’s treatment of the imagination had for the early church fathers, and moves towards considering the human dependence on imagination for the communication of faith - as well as for the work of theology.
Following Footsteps - Visual Art, Depth, and the Perichoretic Framework
Within Christian theology, the trinitarian doctrine of perichoresis (Greek: περιχώρησις) shares with us a reciprocal, potentially beneficial framework for communication. By modeling the non-competitive relationship between the three persons of the trinity – we can begin to contemplate the nature of the trinity in relation to us. In what way does this eternal relationship practically affect our contemporary culture? To use the analogy of dance, I argue that we are continuously and eternally invited into this expressive communication with the divine through the sublime nature of connection. The question is: What does this relationship look like, and how do we join in?
Public Engagement
D. Blango believes that the arts present an opportunity to foster creative, cultural, and ethical dialogue. For these reasons he has committed himself to active engagement with his community through visual art - via teaching, public works, and community services.
