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[Read] Just Opening

Hubert Damisch asked why, historically, painting has to be necessarily validated by a written reference in order to be understood. Feels like now paintings have to be validated with a written reference, a digital connection, and a capitalist consumer design nod. What’s your brand? I am bored. Image culture is demanding. What is the point of painting if pictorial thinking and communication is held captive in the digital, the minimal, the reference, the system, the trend? Pictorial communication needs the idiosyncratic style and inner energy of the individual, it sinks us back into physical humanity. Seeing how someone dots their i’s and slashes their t’s makes us relatable.  

Theorists Byung-Chul Han and Federico Campagna both yield the Digital Age as manipulating the individual toward nihilistic consumption habits through technological screen-based devices. These devices oppress individuals indirectly and drive us toward unavoidable annihilation. One argues we need magic, the other says we need the fool. Both are one in the same.  

I like to argue that painting is the original screen. Its sponsorship demanded Christian propaganda, damaging its clear potential. We are now running to the digital, a limited space in 1 and 0s. In the unbalanced world, we are seeing the repercussions of the gender gap. Too many 1s, not enough 0s. We are misting the surface for new answers. Everything seems to need fixing, transformation, healing. We are all unsettled. Did the screens take us away? I consider how the physicality of painting and the materiality of paint could offer a holistic resistance to our artificial reality, and a means for survival. I’m an optimist. I want to reground the individual back to the sphere of collective consciousness. Sigmund Freud’s most significant finding in his psychoanalytic research (in my opinion), is everyone dreams universally in images. Thinking all this over I take a step to untangling; it isn’t an answer, but it is a direction. 

In this series of twenty-one oil paintings on canvas I used my personal dreamscape as source material for the foundations for every painting’s image and contents. 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 some detectable code. The mark making is a gesture to the elusiveness of language and difficulty to recreate a dream into language. I liked the tension between the personal pictorial landscapes and the invasion by the oppressive nature of language. When these two planes come together, they clash. Seeing and speaking are at odds. 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.