Working on a series of experimental paintings from outdoors observation and then in the studio, I ended up with the basic questions about what happens at the borders of two colours and how we formalise external sensory information. Working directly with paint, without preparatory sketches or underlying drawings before applying paint, was a revealing challenge of painting’s possibilities as a stand alone practice, but also as discourse. I first experimented with the painterly technique of pouring liquid paint directly onto paper and moving the paper around to apply the paint for painting a tree branch from life. Although this process was difficult to control for a realistic result - which led me initially to call the series “Something I cannot control” - it was appropriate for expressing the movement of the tree branch with the wind and the changes in light caused by that movement.
Back in the studio, I singled out a small part of one of the paintings to make a larger painting with brushes, without any underlying drawing again, by paying attention to the areas that were not covered with paint when I was trying the pouring technique. In that stage, the initial object of observation was not relevant anymore. Instead, the emerging inquiry was about the edges of methodically painted surfaces. I noticed there was an almost imperceptible area at the borders of different areas of colour that were neither one colour, nor the other. I wanted to purposefully expose these areas by meticulously smudging the edges of the painted surfaces to make visible that there is a small area around the edges, which remains undecided.
I made the last series of paintings by setting the time of 1’ for each painting, to test the limits of the medium and to see what kind of result I would get when I set specific restrictions. To achieve this, I asked other painters if they would let me borrow the colours they had already mixed; in exchange, I would make a painting that says something about them, since I would be using their own colours. The theme of the natural landscape remained for the economy of the task. I exploited the primer’s whiteness for giving a sense of light and texture to the paintings, although I made them in the studio.
Cezanne pioneered a modern approach in painting that aimed at searching for the truth beyond physical stimuli and sensations, some kind of structure of the physical things. He wanted to see the physical world that he was observing as an object, without the mind’s input that orders adopting a perspectival system, nor the subjective feelings, like his predecessors, the impressionists (Read, 1974: 19). Cezanne’s research served this purpose: for art to achieve a structural order out of the visual impressions. This theoretical approach to art, signaling a heroic effort to overcome romanticism (Read, 1974: 28), intended to formalise an artistic order that corresponds with nature’s order (Read, 1974: 27).
However, as Read (1974: 108) explains, there is an obvious distinction between the artist who attempts to address the viewer’s sensibilities working from perception to representation, or from perception to imagination, deconstructing visual images and recomposing them to a non-representational, rational or conceptual, new order.
For Delaunay, order was found in and somehow was imposed by colour itself:
“[…] Real French art, completely clear and absolute representation, constructed according to the laws of light, or rather of colour, that is to say, purely visual, with a new craft, as was great Italian painting with its old craft; in reaction against all the cerebral incoherences of the cubists, the futurists, centrists, rayonists, integrists, cerebrists, abstractionists, expressionists, dynamists, patheticism (to the exclusion of some distinctions in the research of colour: fauvism, orphists, synchronists).
[…] You noted this effort directed towards the new construction of colour at once mysterious and profound. […] It is one long series of studies of form expressed in light or lights (prism) of the sun, moon, gas, electricity, etc., by means of simultaneous contrasts of colour. The point of departure for these painters is the objective study of colour, of the laws that govern colours – as in music there are laws of sounds. Each creator, each discoverer carries in him the innovations that come to augment the universal patrimony of Art.”(Batchelor, 2008: 68-69)
Movement and colour were the starting points for a subsequent dance improvisation video art installation project. Painting offered another reference in Duchamp’s groundbreaking for his contemporaries Nude descending a staircase (1912), where movement is formalised as broken-down elements of the human figure in motion, which takes place in time and space. Duchamp set out to break with the naturalist tradition of painting an object to elevate painting into a plastic art that creates its own plastic art reality: a painting is an object with its own plastic identity, it doesn’t need to depict something (Read, 1974: 126). For this reason, he used brown hues minimally to give a sculptural quality to his painting.
For the video art interactive installation,
I exploited the artistic view of breaking-down, slowing down, as well as freezing the dancers’ movement for the installation projection that was watched at the same time as the choreographed performance was taking place. The video art installation did not depict the dancers’ performance; it was rather a stand-alone visual art project that accompanied in a conceptually complementary manner the dance performance. I kept colour as a referent to the naturalistic element of physical movement.
Dance improvisation, especially contact improvisation, exploits the continuously changing distance between two or more dancers to develop and build on choreographic techniques for their physical interaction, which often involves sharing the weight of one or more dancers with their dance partners. How the dancer works with the physical borders of other performers is crucial to a successful dance improvisation. Like in my painting, there are always parts of the choreography that are not decided from the beginning, but are continuously created and improvised as the dance unfolds.
References
Batchelor, David (ed.), Colour. “Documents of Contemporary Art”, London: Whitechapel, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Blackburn, Simon, Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Cezanne, Paul, Correspondence, John Rewald (ed.), London: Bernard Grasset, 1941.
Davidson, Donald, "Reply to Foster", Truth and Meaning, G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, 33-41.
Davidson, Donald, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (1974), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, 183-198.
Davidson, Donald, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" (1983), Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, 137-157.
Davidson, Donald, "The Second Person" (1992), Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, 107-121.
Read, Herbert, A Concise History of Modern Painting, London: Thames & Hudson, 2nd edition, 1974.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty, G.E.M. Anscombe and D.H. von Wright (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.