It could be that God is speaking all the time. Yet we, in our remoteness from the Almighty, don’t have what it takes to get the message. As creatures caught in time, we lack the divine language necessary to converse with the infinite. Instead of a chorus of angels, we hear only cosmic silence. If these thoughts have crossed your mind, you’re in good company — deep thinkers in all religious traditions have suffered similar mental convulsions. They’ve engaged in apophatic theology: the creeping sense that the space between you and the Big Guy is too wide to be bridged.Artists, too, grapple with the mysteries of unknowability. Many painters and sculptors respond to signals that they can’t define, can’t place, and can’t even name. In “Banderoles, the Apophatic Sky, and the Memorializing Artifact” at Curious Matter (272 5th St.), Raymond E. Mingst sets banners against the vast firmament. His beautiful little solo show (in a gallery made for beauty and smallness) is full of the ribbonlike flags associated with medieval heraldry and bishopry, and, more recently, advertising and wedding planning. Mingst’s tiny banderoles are coyly curled as if they’re caught in a breeze. They twist all over the walls of the tiny artspace. Most significantly, they’re all completely blank.They are also fashioned from firmer stuff than cloth. The Mingst banderoles are streamers of air-drying clay, curved into by the artist and coated with glossy paint. Little banners in picket fence white unfurl themselves in front of paintings of cloudy skies, as if they were swept out of the hands of a the phalanx commander and taken high up, above the battle, kite-like, to dance in a gale. Black banderoles hang right on the wall with no mediation at all. They’re scraps of inscrutability against a cream-white background. Other slips of ceramic lay in repose in a vitrine. They’re no more forthcoming about their secrets, but at least they’re at rest.The cumulative effect of all this frozen fluttering is a pervasive feeling of destabilization: a snapshot of a moment of turbulence. “Banderoles, the Apophatic Sky, and the Memorializing Artifact” drops the viewer into a chamber of happenstance. Invisible currents have animated these banners. We want to know why, and how, but they aren’t answering back. They’ve been whipped somewhere beyond language. If they ever bore symbols, they’ve been bled off by time, or recalcitrance, or negatory energy.  They dare us to impose a verbal meaning on them and wriggle away from us when we do. But even the most apophatically inclined among us can’t resist a riddle. We do want to know what these artifacts memorialize, and it’s hard not to hazard a guess. White flags signify surrender, and there’s a feeling of acquiescence to fate that pervades this show. Black flags can mean mourning, or piracy, and there’s an intimation here of both — longing for what’s lost, and a drive to seize something new. Though there’s plenty of trouble captured in “Banderoles, the Apophatic Sky, and the Memorializing Artifact,” Mingst’s cloud-streaked skies and delicate clay banners are indisputably pretty.  Whatever has happened here has left a streak of beauty on the mute heavens. Further clues come closer to the ground. Mingst shows us a few standards that aren’t flags at all. In “Untitled (Banderoles),” he shares photographic evidence of urban erasure: a pair of gas station signs painted over in primary colors and left faceless, hovering above the road like oversized traffic lights, one red, one green, stop and go, two contradictory impulses held in tension by the same metal bar.  The former logo is still discernible under the coat of paint, but it no longer signified as it once did.  The city is full of messages like these — blank billboards, whitewashed surfaces, maps written and overwritten, doors to nowhere, façades of businesses with streaks on the walls where letters fell off. Objects and places that once spoke to us speak no more. Marks are made on the architecture, but we don’t know what has been memorialized. All that’s left are the traces: the gorgeous mystery of the street and the urban sky.  Sometimes, that mystery is enough. There’ll be an opening party for “Banderoles, the Apophatic Sky, and the Memorializing Artifact” on Sunday, September 22, at 1 p.m. at Curious Matter.The post At Curious Matter, Raymond E. Mingst Unfurls His Curious Banners appeared first on Jersey City Times.