PRIVATE INVESTIGATION OF AN ABSTRACT PAINTING

ABSTRACT ARTWORKS 2015, Uros Paternu

BASIC DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PICTORIAL SPACE AND PICTORIAL FIELD

     If the process of painting begins with individual units, it moves towards a structured wholeness which accumulates and projects its interiority as a living organism. In order to be able to understand the inseparable fusion of an expanding awareness with the act of painting itself, we tend to seperate such units into shape, colour and form as experienced by the viewer. Here we must differentiate between at least two ways the artist operates – one that is intellectual and conscious, and the other which is articulated through emotion – and both of which are bound together within the creative process despite their duality.

     If we consider form to be the conscious arrangement of interior content then we are referring to the aspect of pictorial space, but if we consider colour to be the primary means and material of painting which dematerialises the structured form into emotion and experience, then its particular characteristic of immanence refers to the pictorial field.

     I think of pictorial space as somewhere to construct, where problems are solved in a conscious way, whereas the impulse within the pictorial field directs me toward emotion and intuition, and especially so in the articulation of colour: the way it belongs to the body of the form, the way it liberates, the way it simply does what it wants. For these reasons I consider it vital to differentiate between conscious and immanent processes within painting, to differentiate everything else from what isgoing on in the background, and to acknowledge the distant source of unconscious, or some other sensation fromabove, or below.

Uros Paternu ©2001. Untitled, Acrylic on canvas, 80x100 cm

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FROM THE THING LOOKED AT TO THE THING SEEN

     After this comprehensive review of some crucial external elements – from the means by which a painting is constructed to a sense of its internal devotion to itself – let us turn to the agency that constitutes its internal cohesion and that connects painting to an immanent spiritual and ethical space: the space of man's growth. Not surprisingly, the most appropriate analogies are to be found in Plato's well-known metaphor of the cave from the 7th book of the Republic, which speaks about the fundamental transformation of man's spirit from dark to light. The metaphor is already part of the way we have constructed a theoretical dualism between the mimetic world of shadows and the implicit viewer, which through their abstraction and interconnection synthesise exterior influences and expand awareness.

     Plato's metaphor differentiates between two basic spheres: the world in which we are trapped as dwellers in a cave, and the ideal world to which we aspire by means of knowing things as themselves – as pure ideas. In the cave people are immobile with a fixed view of the wall before them which is the arena where shadows play, and because the illuminating fire is situated behind their backs these are shadows produced not only by objects but also by the people themselves. Were one of the immobilised viewers to catch the echo of someone passing in the background, then, according to the ancient philosopher, one of two things might happen: either he would assume that the shadow itself was talking, or he would pick himself up and stride towards the voice and the light. In the latter case he would either turn back from the blinding light to the dim semi-darkness, or he would ignore the pain in his eyes and become determined to procced. Were he to manage to pass by the artificial light of the fire and make his way down the passage and out of the cave then, in the hinterland and surrounded by things that are lit by the real light of the sun, he would sooner or later find out that everthing he had seen up until that moment was merely a shadow. Through this testing process he would gradually come to understand his own reality as well as the profound and original truth of truth itself. To refuse to accept the reality of shadows, to progress through awareness and self-knowledge toa direct vision of the thing seen is equivalent to the process that transforms perception through experience and creation.

     As both the title and the introductory metaphor show, the performative function of awareness and perception is not only related to religion and other material manifestations of what lies beyond. The metaphor of looking and seeing also pictures the way a painting throws out a bridge for the viewer to cross, and invites the potential to expand awareness toward vision.

     The more that a painting retreats from a mimetic allusion to the external world, the more difficult becomes the task that faces the viewer: the more difficult it becomes to understand the motivation and content of a painting, so the more the painting is host to a charged inner atmosphere. It becomes more than an assembly of abstracted information that plays against a familiar external world, and this is why it becomes vital for the viewer to look inside himself, and to orientate his perception through a resonance that  leaves nothing to coincidence. It is an explenential journey through sensibility and perception that ultimately switches back and has recreated image and association, only this time at a higher level of awareness.

     Gandhi advised us to make the unnecessary necessary: to find a lack in surplus, or to find lack  and surplus at the same time. If today the same rule applies, then it allows us to understand better this permanent desire for selective creation withina super-abundant environment whose basic dynamic is an archetypal mingling of religious and socialconstructs. The way an artist weaves his own reality is just an attempt to situate himself unblinded by the polished armoury ranged about him. It creates a rational distance from Solomon's mirror-toting warriors and attempts a clear view of his own lived truth. Such perception creates the chance for an artist to step closer to a living and purified image, that grows, that expands awareness and that admits the possibility for spontaneous progress.

     The creative act of painting, however, is not only a journey to the inside but also a problematisation of reality as a settled form of picturedness. The function of artistic perception is therefore not just to be in the world and to search for solutions within one's own inner reality; at the same time it renders conscious the dialectical weaving together of certain situational and phenomenal worlds. For this reason it is necessary to disseminate it – to weave it into the rhetorical fabric of shared discourse – which gives it both an apparently self-sufficient reality and the chance to be seen. Then, in turn, this reappearance of a reconstituted and non-ideological discourse can be questioned again. If the Modernist classic addressed exactly that kind of question to the future, then today the objection is being raised about its relevance and the reasons to include it in contemporary discourse.

     The articulationof a certain ideology of image and means whose background derives from Modernism still makes high claims on theory and its practical application, but it doesn't survive post-Modern deconstruction except as something stolen from a museum or a meaningless installation. Neither can it withstand the alibi of absent values that dominates contemporary culture, and which has recodified the new in art.

     It is characteristic of every age, but especially so of Modernism, that a critical and testing relationship to the past is established. It is also characteristic that freedom is proposed as the only sensible and successful organising condition, insofar as it remains aware of its limits and that the results of its action are seen today as affirmative. It is precisely that kind of creative relationship to the past that establishes a field of potential whereby we may crossover to new ideal solutions as well as to derive stylistic innovations which will themselves always be interesting, if fatal. If we dont exclude the technical and innovative trajectories of Modernism that represent its potential and, indeed, its only value, we can appreciate a feeling and a grasp of the Modernist period that certainly appears different today to the way it was seen in the past.

     In contrast to Modernism, the subsequent post-Modernism espouses nihilistic principles that attempt a synthesis of everything up to the present, and propose an intellectual assembly of historical matter that amounts to little more than straight theft. This is far from a properly testing relationship and is of doubtful value: it is dominated by arbitray factors like mood, coincidence and improvisation, and more often than not imposes a passive state of temporal awareness. It is against the background of this moment in cultural history that we find ourselves trying to describe a fleeting view of an endless work-in-progress, rather than discussing painting or sculpture per se. For art and cosmopolitan values to survive at all depends on the comic figure of the private critic who no longer looks for the new but sees only what has already been seen as it exists in his mind, who moves around with the earflaps of his folky Slovene woolly cap pulled down tight against fresh breezes, and who is a sign of the national identity of Slovene art. If we dare to escape from this nationalist ethnographic paradigm we find that there is only one direction to follow: through a classicality of expression coupled to a creative awareness of it, and through the rich potential for constructive addition to it that amounts to its true future.

     To face this double aspect of devotion and dissolution reinvigorates the sense of a present, historical dualism: painting and sculptureas something that is still alive from an artistic point of view. If painting, by another name, existed 20,000 years ago to demonstrate man's pure, irrational and incontrovertible need to express himself and to signify hisexistence, then it seems fair to ask the question why it is losing its name and significance today. The loss of this original creative perception can be accounted for from at least two general perspectives.

     First, in post-industrial socienty the play ofself-determined local interest, and an increasing deviation into speciallised interest has meant that the border between public and private life has vanished as much in the reorganisation of work practises as in the organisation of free time. The direct consequence of this has been the disengagement of the public from active participation in external and above all cultural space, and the replacement of this function by the media, all of which has endangered intimacy. This phenomenon grew out of the way industrial societies were organised in the 19th century and the appearance of specialisations which increasingly segmented and partialised the wholeness of society. The later post-industrial phase which is aggressively dominated by the capital of information – the media –operates exclusively to make a profit, and this, coupled with the phenomenon of negative inflation, is especially bad for culture.

     Second, the consequence of our saturation with data and the endless echo of aggressive media messages has been to disorientate individually directed interest, and in the newborn emptiness and absence of quality product in our time a potential audience canno longer respond with confidence to the quieter, but more meaningful and truthful multidimensional medium of painting. Rather, it finds itself perpetually overtaken by the juggernaut of mass communucation. That a calm awareness is the necessary and perpetual precondition for the further life of contemporary painting can be clearly understood from the many (dis)tempered views expressed in this section.

Uros Paternu©Untitled, 2006, Acrylic on cancas (110 x 160 cm)

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BETWEEN AUTHOR AND IMPLICIT VIEWER

     It is clear from the introduction that it is the painter himself who is implied by the duality of implicit viewer and the author: he is director of the fragments which originate along with the entire scape of interior elements, and he directs proceedings toward the reorganised articulation of the image field.

     On one hand this relationship is the result of an understanding of Modernist painting and a painter's devotion to history; on the other its process means that different data keeps building up into reciprocal unity on the stage of the host-canvas, and that both the possibility, the reason and the means present themselves so that they may perform their meaning as actors and transmit their interior impulses toward the present moment.

    The movement of perception from painting to viewer proceeds dualistically as 'atmospheric' perception, and 'mentally censored' perception; between the higher principle of imagination – the associative grasp of imagery by theviewer – and the process of cross-matching data: a kind of intellect-as-perception. This dualistically tangled relationship is what binds up the viewer immanence and temporality throughout the process of perception.

     It follows on that image is read rationally, whereas colour is experienced. A painting requires to be read as information-data that is as closely in parallel as possible to its interior drama – and to achieve this the viewer must be 'in-between', in an empty space that is implied by the in-betweeness of the picture itself. As it stands before the viewer, a painting must demand the viewer's attention, and slow down or erase his mental process. A painting needs to interrupt time and create its own special moment as an invitation to insight, or as a meditative interlude.

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