This
attempt to make a personal commentary is principally concerned with the
relationship between material and spiritual aspects in the process of creation
of a painting. The process of painting itself is 'decentralised': the painter
is always already split between the roles
of author and implicit viewer, and in this way
the ideal, or eventual viewer has
already been framed within the field of the image. The energies contained by
the frame are determined on one side by the bifurcated role of the author as he
constructs an image field in progress towards the painting itself, and on the
other by its 'finishedness', the hidden ideal that is consummated on the easel,
the potential for revelation which is akin to the sphinx motif in Pharonic
imagery, the immanence of its living body. This concept of 'ideal finishedness'
is much closer to the Egyptian reception of an image than the eschatological
processes associatedwith much later west European models.
Before
an empty canvas becomes a filled organism, there stretches a vastand empty
length of time, an organised expansion of awareness through perception. Modern
painting in particular anticipates the potential of this emptiness between the
simplifications of eschatological linearity andthe cosmic archetypes of
regenerative and cyclical ritual. This 'inbetween-ness' has grown from the
necessity to rearticulate content, and has been frequently and well explored in
Modernist practise. It emphasises a moment of scission from linear thinking in
the construction of the still unthought and unconceived, the unarticulated presence.
That 'present moment' within creative awareness
becomes the only condition by which a possibility exists to pass from
anarchetypal to a temporal experience of the new, and it should not be taken to
imply a manner of work nor simply an innovation amidst the anticipated collapse
of modernity.
The
classic emphasis of Modernism is that it expresses both devotion and
dissolution at the same time. It tears us
away from the simplifications of cliche and the hunt for celebrity but
still binds us into the moment of its own emergency through the necessity
repeatedly to reestablish complexity within the historical transformation of
ideal form. A view opens through to the other side of hidden and repressed
dogma, through specific aura to the spectrum of dislocated inversion where
constructive creativity remains just possible in the medium of painting. The
medium can reflect or – better – betray the actual view itself that reaches out
from behind our censored awareness.
The
spiritual freedom within the game of doing it takes the form of mapping out the
host-canvas, the field of transmission, as it accumulates various kinds of
codified image information.
In
other words, the physical situation of this imagery is that it becomes
distanced off into the background when confronted by the external power of the
instant effect which itself appears physically only at the level of its own
consumedness and futility. The postulation of mimesis on the part the naive
viewer is severed because both he and the weight of whatever historical baggage
he brings with him are both erased from circuit. Nevertheless, the position of
the viewer is automatically altered and gathered within their reifiedbelonging
to social reality. Thus a view, or bridge, is forged to the imagery of the
painting which itselfstands on a borderline: between being a thing in the world that seems to posit its perfect
imaginability, and the concrete ilusion which surrounds us.
Painting
can be interpreted from the perspective of both its lack and its hermetic
saturation. In the case of lack the keyis the time spent to look, the various
transmissions that take place between the viewer's first impulse up to the
consequences of the meditative investment created in the meantime. This
duration mediates between the quantity of visual material and the quality of
its contents.
The
rupture of segmented images within the construction of the totality expressed
by the pictorial form occurs by means of a precodifiedsystem within the images
themselves that allows a measure of permeabillity, so that the veils of image
may be passed through towards their content and towards active insight, all of
which can be differentiated from the negative connotations of the »quantity of
the seen«. This way the spectator becomes
entangled, captured and embraced by the mapped out interior space of the
painting. The inherent means to decode the painted image spring out from a
spiritual source, and its trajectory into time is activated in the fertile,
spiritual and dreamy interaction between the inhalation of dematerialised
matter into the interior of the host-canvas, and the materialised exhalation of
the surface which the painting itself breathes out into the viewer's attending
presence.
Copyright©Uroš Paternu
