About painting

One of the most excellent targets aimed at in modern painting is making a picture that evokes a sublime experience - The sublime image.

This could be achieved by the artist who has a complete mastery of the goal and purpose of painting - the unanimity between image and surface.

Colour should not then be seen as purely chromatic (red, yellow, blue a.s.o.), or as depicting element representationally relating to the visible world.

 

But "painting forms the objectless impression via the pass through the reduction process of abstract painting"

Colour should be apprehended as a metaphysical reality in its own sense - a pure spiritual form.

It is not another reality, not another world, but a deepening of the world we already exist in.

The colour on the surface is what we see, but it is at the same time a higher and more essential reality, beyond the immediate visibility - the objectless perception, an expression of the absolute.

An expression of the interaction between object, image and body.

An abstract painting must have a "subject matter - a content", otherwise it deteriorates to simple decoration.

"the subject matter is crucial and the only valid subject is tragic and timeless"

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The exhibition "The art of covering or to serve a surface"

Attached on my big paintings are small plates or wooden boards with illustrating drawings and commenting texts - these are fixed with Velcro closing and detachable.

By removing them you might get a sublime piece of art, an entrance to a higher and more essential reality.

But do these painted surfaces have enough "subject matter - content" for this?

Maybe they have - or maybe it takes a more credible mediation, an artistic context with even higher credibility to provide this?

What constitutes the experience of a body - form, structure, colour - covered, uncovered? Object of desire - dislike?

The absolute image - the painting - that only states "I am here, I am yours, be mine", does it constitute itself in the gaze of the beholder as an object of desire or does the gaze in this case just provide an existential sensation - a "purer" gaze ?

 

Quotations: Lyotard, Merleau-Ponty, Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb etc.