about. Believing that everybody is potentially an artist, he took objects and arranged them in such a way that they beg the spectator to collaborate with them, not this time by painting, but by listening to what their eyes tell them and remembering.
I know of few things more sad (sad, not tragic) than an animal who has lost its sight. Unlike humans, the animal has no supporting language left which can describe the world. If on a familiar terrain, the blind animal manages to find its way about with its nose. But it has been deprived of the existent and with this deprivation it begins to diminish until it does little but sleep, therein perhaps hunting for a dream of that which once existed.
The Marquise de Sorcy de Thélusson, painted in 1790 by David, looks at me. Who could have foreseen in her time the solitude in which people today live? A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless and false images concerning the world. Yet their falseness is not an error. If the pursuit of profit is considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, turnover becomes the absolute priority, and, consequently, the existent has to be disregarded or ignored or suppressed.
Today, to try to paint the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope.
3
Studio Talk
( for Miguel Barceló )
A scrap of paper crumpled up and thrown on the studio floor amongst unstretched canvases, on which you stand, pails of pigment – some mixed with clay, the odd saucepan, broken sticks of charcoal, rags, discarded drawings, two empty cups. On the scrap of paper are written two words: FACE and PLACE.
The studio was once a bicycle factory, no? You work here in your painting shoes and clothes. The shirt and trousers were originally striped. Now, like the shoes, they are encrusted with pigment. So I picture you as two people: a man about to ride away on his bicycle and a convict.
However, the only thing which matters, when the day is done, is what lies painted on the floor or leaning against the walls, waiting to be seen the next day. What matters is what the changing light can never quite reveal – the thing, to which one is nearest, when one fears one has probably lost it.
Face.
Whatever the painter is looking for, he’s looking for its face. All the search and the losing and the re-finding is about that, isn’t it? And ‘its face’ means what? He’s looking for its return gaze and he’s looking for its expression – a slight sign of its inner life. And this is true whether he’s painting a cherry, a bicycle wheel, a blue rectangle, a carcass, a river, a bush, a hill or his own reflection in a mirror.
Photos, videos, films never find the face; at their best they find memories of appearances and likenesses. The face, by contrast, is always new: something never before seen and yet familiar. (Familiar because, when asleep, we perhaps dream of the face of the whole world, into which at birth we were blindly thrown.)
We see a face only if it looks at us. (Like Vincent’s sunflower.) A profile is never a face, and cameras somehow turn most faces into profiles.
When we have to stop before a finished painting, we stop as before an animal who is looking at us. Yes, this is even true for Antonello da Messina’s
Pietà with an Angel!
The paint laid or brushed or smeared on to the surface is the animal, and its ‘look’ is its face. Think of the face of Vermeer’s
View of Delft.
Later the animal hides, but it’s always there when it first stops us and won’t allow us to go on.
An old story that goes back to the caves.
Place
, place in the sense of
lieu, luogo, ort, mestopolojenie.
The last Russian word also means
situation
and this is worth remembering.
A place is more than an area. A place surrounds something. A place is the extension of a presence or the consequence of an action. A place is the opposite of empty space. A place is where an event has taken or is taking place.
The painter is continually trying to discover, to stumble
I know of few things more sad (sad, not tragic) than an animal who has lost its sight. Unlike humans, the animal has no supporting language left which can describe the world. If on a familiar terrain, the blind animal manages to find its way about with its nose. But it has been deprived of the existent and with this deprivation it begins to diminish until it does little but sleep, therein perhaps hunting for a dream of that which once existed.
The Marquise de Sorcy de Thélusson, painted in 1790 by David, looks at me. Who could have foreseen in her time the solitude in which people today live? A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless and false images concerning the world. Yet their falseness is not an error. If the pursuit of profit is considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, turnover becomes the absolute priority, and, consequently, the existent has to be disregarded or ignored or suppressed.
Today, to try to paint the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope.
3
Studio Talk
( for Miguel Barceló )
A scrap of paper crumpled up and thrown on the studio floor amongst unstretched canvases, on which you stand, pails of pigment – some mixed with clay, the odd saucepan, broken sticks of charcoal, rags, discarded drawings, two empty cups. On the scrap of paper are written two words: FACE and PLACE.
The studio was once a bicycle factory, no? You work here in your painting shoes and clothes. The shirt and trousers were originally striped. Now, like the shoes, they are encrusted with pigment. So I picture you as two people: a man about to ride away on his bicycle and a convict.
However, the only thing which matters, when the day is done, is what lies painted on the floor or leaning against the walls, waiting to be seen the next day. What matters is what the changing light can never quite reveal – the thing, to which one is nearest, when one fears one has probably lost it.
Face.
Whatever the painter is looking for, he’s looking for its face. All the search and the losing and the re-finding is about that, isn’t it? And ‘its face’ means what? He’s looking for its return gaze and he’s looking for its expression – a slight sign of its inner life. And this is true whether he’s painting a cherry, a bicycle wheel, a blue rectangle, a carcass, a river, a bush, a hill or his own reflection in a mirror.
Photos, videos, films never find the face; at their best they find memories of appearances and likenesses. The face, by contrast, is always new: something never before seen and yet familiar. (Familiar because, when asleep, we perhaps dream of the face of the whole world, into which at birth we were blindly thrown.)
We see a face only if it looks at us. (Like Vincent’s sunflower.) A profile is never a face, and cameras somehow turn most faces into profiles.
When we have to stop before a finished painting, we stop as before an animal who is looking at us. Yes, this is even true for Antonello da Messina’s
Pietà with an Angel!
The paint laid or brushed or smeared on to the surface is the animal, and its ‘look’ is its face. Think of the face of Vermeer’s
View of Delft.
Later the animal hides, but it’s always there when it first stops us and won’t allow us to go on.
An old story that goes back to the caves.
Place
, place in the sense of
lieu, luogo, ort, mestopolojenie.
The last Russian word also means
situation
and this is worth remembering.
A place is more than an area. A place surrounds something. A place is the extension of a presence or the consequence of an action. A place is the opposite of empty space. A place is where an event has taken or is taking place.
The painter is continually trying to discover, to stumble
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