˘˙˙˚°º•·… ˛_Î ıı <`|´  (•) ıı`|´< ¡ ø| º…·•º°˚˙˙˘

2022

 ˘˙˙˚°º•·… ˛_Î ıı <`|´  (•) ıı`|´< ¡ ø| º…·•º°˚˙˙˘

˘˙˙˚°º•·… ˛_Î ıı <`|´ (•) ıı`|´< ¡ ø| º…·•º°˚˙˙˘ [Read Just Opening] is a series of twenty-one oil paintings, created from a painterly approach to pictorial communication in the 21st Century. The paintings are meant to compliment the artist's thesis paper which argues that pictorial thinking and communication is becoming lost to digital technology. Pictorial communication retains the idiosyncratic style and inner energy of the individual. The Digital Age, manipulates the individual toward nihilistic consumption habits through screen-based technological devices. As painting could be considered the original screen, I consider the holistic properties of pictorial communication that create resistance to these new powers and that bring self-awareness back to the individual.

The paintings aim to honor an idea put forth by Hubert Damisch that historically painting has to be necessarily validated by a written reference, in order to be understood. I prefer to think that painting, as a form of communication, can stand alone and separated from a written reference, including my thesis and this paragraph about my work. To avoid a tangent on abstraction, equity, and perspective, I redirect the focus to the process of the painting's creation. In the same article that Damisch asks why painting must always be a reference to the literary, he also identifies Sigmund Freud’s most significant finding in all his psychoanalytic research (in my opinion), that universally everyone dreams in images. For this group of paintings I used my personal dreamscape to source the pictorial foundations of every painting. As the paintings developed I integrated marks, based on a reimagined modern English alphabet. This alphabet was not made to describe the work or even become some detectable code. I thought of it instead, as a gesture to the elusiveness of language and how after our dreams it is often difficult to describe and recreate the dream in language. I like that in the paintings this form of mark making became the tension between the personal pictorial landscapes and the invasion by the oppressive nature of language. When these two spaces come together, they clash. I attempted to reconcile their differences to allow a space for both experiences of communication. The titles were created to mirror the pictorial experiences in the paintings and to not influence the viewer’s relationship with the work.