The painting is made, or the artist is made by the painting. What makes this event take place is something in between all things, not an accident or an intentional drive, rather a non-binary ‘natural’ chaotic arrangement driven by experience, chance, instinct: a kind of subjective continuity determined by that which is at hand, the insistence of a will towards the edge. This is the ultimate point: the receding subject, the mirage of the image and of the world. More than any social media feed or information stream, it is within the creative process the individual enters the chaotic reality of the whole, unmediated to a certain degree, or at least as an independent means to produce its own logic. In here all must fold back to poetry, psychedelics, consciousness. Soaked in such type of totality, this is like the movement of a feline in defence or attack, it requires a certain agility, paused consideration, elegance, retreat, vulgar aggression, etc. From this point one can only forget about the dilution of the image on the basis for a consideration to the audience. It is the audience that represent all that is accidental, its opinions as variable as the passing clouds, fleeting and increasing unengaged in front of white light.
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The failure in visionary art is in many instances on the part of the audience, since the power of its imagery is a thing given, a compound attached to the psychedelic consciousness of the artist. It is on the opposite polar end of calculated commodity production. It serves only the understanding of the creator. This might sound arrogant when formulated, but it is in essence not the case. Take a child’s drawing, it is a subjective formulation of the world by limited means, it however holds his or her entire experience of the thing, of the subject. It conveys a total experience at the limit of the child’s capabilities. It contains the thing at hand at the limit of what is possible. It is a naked confession of carefree crudeness and crucially, the naive will that overcomes it. In short, it is not concerned with the status of the object in the world, but only with the object as a reflective thing on its own accord.
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My daughter’s version of me in the studio
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Art does not have to be pleasing, it is not by nature a thing of beauty. Its purpose, if it certainly has any, is to reach the essence of what is at hand. This leads to an issue in cognitive capabilities for each artist, their skills and capacity to discern the patterns within their subjectivity and their understanding of the world through their senses. I think there is little to say on this, clearly some are more capable than others at certain tasks. The artist however must play its weaknesses, mine the deficiencies, exploit the ugly, explore the abject. The artist must tell the whole story. Otherwise the result will be contrived, formulated, kitsch. This is not to say all art must be bent on the ugly, not all have a taste or indeed a need to visit these regions of human experience for long stretches of time. However I confidently believe all great art embraces the ugly in one form of another, perhaps as a concealed element, through plays in meaning, technique, etc. How could it be otherwise? The world itself provides the clues, although in our modern environments they have been carefully put away, mediated, diluted.
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We should never forget we all have dreamt of paradise at one point of another, that absolute subjective positivity. In European culture, we have been dreaming of this exit for a long time. The advent of the modern world in the sixteenth century did not do much to change the essence of this chimera. As the idea of god gravitated to that of man and the individual, art gravitated to other forms of abstraction and positivity. Overall its recurrent element is that of a permanent state of things where the world becomes positive in all its aspects. One could call it paradise propaganda, or the elevation of hegemonic values to an idealised categorical totality. We are now placed at the excess of this positivity in yet another permutation, a limitless void of algorithmic meaninglessness in line with the cult of capital and the agony of permanently exposed identities within the sphere of their fictionalised compulsory production. Identities?. Perhaps we should be talking about commodities. This is the absolute acceleration of imagery towards the deconstruction of all meaning, the (unintended?) achievement of puritan representation and construction of ‘unmediated space’. It is however a good reminder to understand all human spaces are mediated by human power, and that the idea of an unmediated stream of thought, let alone any kind of community is here the real extravagance. At least the Renaissance still had some room for sublime visions of hell on earth, reflections on the misery of the world and its experience, albeit commonly mediated by dogmatic imagery. In line with this medieval traditions of the carnivalesque created spaces for social critique and the representation of hegemonic values through the grotesque and the abject. With exception of a few works in the Baroque and subsequent periods (notably including the tradition of caricature prints in the XVIII c.), we would have to wait for Goya’s complete transgression in his painting “the 5th of May” of 1808 and the subsequent black paintings to get a glimpse of what is possible when an artist finally crosses the threshold of art produced as pleasantry or propaganda; a step beyond common place classical inspired narratives or biblical subjects. This is the real miracle, perhaps the real starting point of modernity in visual art. We are at present far away from this achievement, regression is indeed more common than the breaking of boundaries, at least as art history goes.
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Art is the extreme of all that is possible. It can if needed avoid beauty and all the other niceties in which it is in many instances bounded. After all what is beautiful? In contemporary art, the bad short answer will be: that which enters the cannon of what has been accepted as such. This is the result of a concatenation of subjectivities falling into agreement, not only by considerations of a body of work, its timeliness, talent, etc, but on account of a myriad of external factors that prevent or accelerate the work’s place in the canon (from which it can be drop in a whim). Art does not stand outside of all of this, but it must speak of it where possible. Let’s get into this paradox: don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Only that it will feed you, at least in most cases, if compliance is held. This is nothing new, Caravaggio had a full plate of it, and it is the case with most art that becomes a challenge to the canon of its time. The Vatican or the politics of resistance?. The Pope or the mystic?. Neither one or the other, but the grotesque laughter that looks at both in complete disbelief.