The Future Is Already Unfolding

An interview with Eunice Gall, Transylvanian artist and contemporary Christian mystic.

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Last summer, Comment editor-in-chief Anne Snyder travelled to Romania, where she was introduced to a contemporary Christian mystic: Eunice Gall. Their resulting collaboration led to a special installation of Gall’s painting Transfiguration at the Understory festival.

Alongside her visual work, Gall herself was a spiritual and artistic leavening force at the festival. She articulated the deep wells of her practice during a special breakout session, “Learning from the Mystics,” where attendees experienced a quiet encounter with the piece and reflected on what a ritual of communal contemplation and action can look like in local neighbourhoods.

Gall’s presence at the festival was a beautiful expression of Comment’s belief that friendship is a theory of change. In this online-only interview, Gall reflects on her time at the Understory festival, the movement from immersion to transfiguration, and what might come next.

Tiffany Thompson: First, thanks to you and your husband Nelson for coming the furthest distance to the Understory festival. Could you share a bit about the call you felt to be present at this sacred gathering and what the journey to be with us stirred for you?

Eunice Gall: In my home country, gatherings like the Understory that reach beyond theology and create space for the church fathers, the mystics, and culture are almost nonexistent. So the very idea of being with people who carry a similar hunger for these things was more than enough to stir something in me and make me want to be there.

But the journey ended up giving birth to something I hadn’t anticipated. For both Nelson and me, it brought together old passions that we had always carried separately, without ever imagining them as parts of a whole.

It was in the morning, toward the end of the festival, that the idea suddenly came to both of us—almost simultaneously. It felt less like we had come up with something new and more like something that had been waiting to be recognized had emerged. The journey to the Understory didn’t simply bring us into a gathering; it helped us see a possibility that had been in the making all along, quietly baking beneath the surface.

A man speaks at a podium in a sunlit room to a seated audience. Large windows let in natural light, and a large artwork on an easel stands beside the podium.

James K.A. Smith speaks at the breakout session “Learning from the Mystics” beside Gall’s painting Transfiguration.

TT: Would you share a few of the insights you offered during the “Learning from the Mystics” breakout with James K.A. Smith and Lisa Shirk? Why did you choose Transfiguration as the painting to bring with you to this session?

EG: I chose Transfiguration because I see it as a kind of preview of what is to come—a way of seeing the future through a different set of eyes, the eyes of revelation.

The work was inspired by what I have come to understand as being at the heart of mystical thought: the restoration of all things through our transfiguration into the image of Christ. I believe art has the capacity to envision the future, and Transfiguration is, in many ways, the future I see within—the future I sense is already unfolding.

One of the insights that came out of the conversation was how the mystics made me rethink the apocalypse and the meaning of apokatastasis. Instead of seeing the apocalypse primarily as destruction, I began to see it as an unveiling, a revealing of what has been hidden. Apokatastasis, in its sense of restoration, opens up a different vision of where we are going: not toward separation but toward restoration, not away from union but deeper into it.

Perhaps the most radical insight for me is that the only barrier to experiencing the kingdom is the belief that it is not already here. We enter eternity here.

The resurrection, the transfiguration—the climax—is located in the middle. Not simply coming from above, as it is so often imagined in our collective memory, but igniting within the lower world and rising toward the meeting place, the place of revelation, where the heaven that is to come is kindled from within us.

Perhaps this is what the mystics have always been inviting us to see: that what we call “the future” may already be present, waiting to be unveiled.

TT: In our most recent print issue, we featured another one of your paintings, Immerse. Could you tell us more about that painting, and how it might also connect to the themes of the Understory?

EG: The making of Immerse was a unique experience for me because it was completely outside my usual way of working and technique. At the time, I had not painted in oil for seventeen years, so I did not fully control the medium. I quite literally went with the flow. In fact, I can hardly remember exactly how I made it.

The painting itself somehow preceded my conscious understanding of what I—and many others of my generation—would later come to experience. This makes me believe that the work was, in some way, inspired for this particular historical moment: a time of transition between dimensions, between eras. It speaks to a change that cannot be navigated through control or force but only through surrender to the Spirit.

Immerse reflects something of what happens within the Understory—or perhaps what the Understory itself proposes, invites you into, and awakens within you: a journey inward.

Into waters that, at first encounter, may feel heavy, unfamiliar, and outside your natural element. Yet, at the same time, they awaken in you a curiosity to venture further, deeper, into waters unknown to you.

Not everybody has the courage to dive into the Understory, but perhaps one can at least hear its call from the surface: the invitation to know things more deeply, to leave the surface—and the mainstream narrative—behind, and to enter into what lies beneath.

A ghostly, translucent figure appears to be sinking or floating underwater, surrounded by swirling, cloudy currents in a dark, mysterious setting.

Immerse, 43.3 x 78.7 inch, oil on canvas by Eunice Gall, 2023.Gall’s painting Immerse.

Excerpt from artist’s statement: “The journey is inward: into the realm of rest, toward the hidden self, into truth, into δικαιοσύνη—dikaiosyne. A call can be perceived in the glow upon the surface of the water—a radiance that surprises and awakens curiosity, inviting you to surrender to the unknown, like an echo from another world. The leap of abandonment—the act of releasing control without resistance—is like death. It is the hardest step: moving out of the dimension of known reality, of good and evil, into the dimension of unknown life. It is the death of the false self within the waters of immersion, the waters of revelation. It is the passage beyond the depths, toward the realm of rest. Dive in. Immerse yourself in the unknown of believing.”

TT: How do you see Immerse and Transfiguration resonating with each other?

EG: In one painting, the figure is falling; in the other, it is rising. The descent is individual; the ascent is collective.

Immerse is the first movement: the fall, the surrender, the casting out of the physical dimension, the washing of consciousness and the burning away of the mind. But once you reach the planet “below”—because this journey appears upside down to the human mind, reversing everything we have been taught to believe about growth, success, and life—you breathe. For the first time, you truly breathe as who you really are.

What follows is the emergence: Transfiguration. Here, we see the figure rising out of the waters, through the waters, and beyond them, piercing through the firmament.

TT: Since the Understory festival, Anne and I have been travelling across the US asking people, “What is your Understory story?” We’ve been exploring what seeds were planted in people and what dreams were encouraged or sparked. What might be next for you?

EG: For now, we are simply cherishing it in our hearts, as Mary did with the things she heard and pondered. It feels like a baby—small, hidden, and already marvellous in our eyes, yet almost impossible to imagine what it might become.

We came away with the beginning of a project that could perhaps grow into a movement. It will involve people from many different backgrounds and walks of life. It is holistic in this sense. For now, we are waiting, listening, and writing down what was planted in us.

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Date:
- September 10, 2026
Theme:
- The Paradoxes of Control
Topics:
- Arts,
- Imagination

Eunice Gall

Eunice Gall is a Romanian visual artist whose practice unfolds at the meeting point of contemporary visual expression and spiritual-philosophical exploration. Her work has been shown across Romania and internationally, including in the United Kingdom and the United States.
BIO
Tiffany Thompson

Tiffany Thompson is the executive editor of Comment magazine and was the executive producer of the Understory festival.
BIO

The Future Is Already Unfolding

The Future Is Already Unfolding

Eunice Gall

Tiffany Thompson

The Future Is Already Unfolding

An interview with Eunice Gall, Transylvanian artist and contemporary Christian mystic.

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Eunice Gall

Tiffany Thompson

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