Blue series // Red series
On Meaning of Abstraction in Art
Abstract art challenges the viewers in a particular way: they are required to look with fresh eyes at pictures that are different. They have to discard old habits, such as the desire to recognize something… abstract art does not imitate, it represents in a different way. Viewers find no affirmation of themselves in what they see. They are denied the satisfaction of re-encountering a known reality…One of abstract art’s great discoveries is undoubtedly to have made reality’s energetic side visible again. It helps us to comprehend that Nature is just as invisible, immaterial and dynamic as it is tangible, concrete and static. The importance of the in-between is rediscovered. The abstract representation of reality is founded on the two-way flow of visual energies. Gottfried Boehm (1994) (Gooding, 2001, p. 91)
“A painting is made with colored paint on a surface, and what you see is what you see’ This popular and melancholy cliché is so remote from my own concern. In my experience, a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I do not know what a panting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere, a trifle, some detail observed, wondered about and, naturally, from previous painting. The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane that is imagined. It moves in the mind…I think the idea of the pleasure of the eye is not merely limited, it isn’t even possible. Everything means something. Anything in life or in art, any mark you make has meaning and the only question is ‘what kind of meaning?’ Philip Guston (1978) (Gooding, 2001, p. 91)
- THE RE-ASSESSMENT OF PAINTING & MATERIALS: Algorithm
‘The subject (of the painting) is not the object [in this case, the woman reading ], it is a new unity [this new ‘subject of the painting], a lyricism which grows completely from the means (the medium and its manipulation).’ (Braque, 1917 ) ‘This is to say that it is the act of painting that creates the poetic truth; it is the artist who constructs the image. This making of picture is something similar to the complex of perception and conception that constitutes our true experience of ‘seeing’. Woman reading is as much a painting about the act of painting its subject, that is, about the nature of seeing the natural object, asit is painting of the subject. What is presented to the eye are fragment, suggestions, adumbrations, with some fairly perfunctory indications of the recognizable facts. What is asserted, in purely pictorial terms, is that we encounter the world visually as a succession of moments, nanoseconds of perception, organizing it continuously (and most unconsciously) into a coherence that is necessarily personal to the perceiver. (Gooding, 2001, p. 37)
Referring to Georges Braque cubist painting “Woman Reading” 1911
Natural Systems: Chaos and Harmony
Digital Print Series: Blue
Singapore 2006-2008
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The idea of using automatic techniques of algorithm as a means to generate imagery includes expressive needs parallel to risks Jacksons Pollock took as ‘action painter’ in abandoning traditional studio routines. The act of digital painting creates an equal cooperation between painter and machine that results in a set of rules and in an organizational model that once in motion produces something that is very often independent of author. As organic algorithmic brushes are growing and blending smoothly with one another, the images are spontaneously self-generating, expanding and assuming multifarious shapes. Self-generating painting is conceived again as an ’action’ fraught with risk, but leading, when successful, to the thrilling discovery of original and revelatory image. The main significance is not only on techniques employed rather on artist’s understanding of new digital means and radicality of the works one can produce using algorithm. The technique is not merely mechanical method but is integral to aesthetic expression itself. While lavish and extranvagant in spirit one utilizes most economic means of color, blue, red or gold to get to a special kind of lyricism. Often symmetrically mirrored kaleidoscopic imagery reflects characteristics of algorithms as “comprehensible yet unpredictable descriptions of themselves”. As such, it is in principle easily possible to articulate any number of the same work. Within a picture, the system of rules can also be expanded at will. Work becomes prototype of similar series of work. Given the arbitrary repeatability, this set of works requires, the question of originality arises. Nonetheless: even though we are familiar with the simple method behind the generation of this picture, there is always something mysterious and exciting about it.” (Pamminger, 2008).
‘Paradoxically the commitment might be to the creation of imagery that is ‘automatic’, hallucinatory method that is, arrived at without conscious deliberation, as the consequence of spontaneous arbitrary ‘actions’ rather than of considered 3d intentions. Its unpremeditated and unpredictable forms were derived, from the individual or collective consciousness, rather in the manner that free association or dreams had been demonstrated by psychoanalysis to bring into view things normally hidden from the conscious mind. ‘ (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999) (Beyeler Museum AG, 2008)
Sometimes the artist leaves things to the materials themselves, to the colors freely splashed on to the canvas, the burlap or the metal, so that they may speak with the immediacy of a random or unexpected laceration. Thus, it often seems as if the work of art has foresworn all pretensions to form in order to allow the canvas or the sculpture to become what is almost a natural thing, a gift of chance, like those shapes the seawater draws on the sand, or the patterns made by raindrops in the mud…They are using such materials to make an art work and, in doing so, they are selecting, highlighting, and thereby conferring form upon the formless and setting the seal of their style upon it…In this way, therefore, the exploration of materials, or the elaboration of them, leads us to discover their hidden beauty…Finally, today, sophisticated electronic techniques also allow us to find unexpected formal aspects in the depths of material, just as once we used to admire the beauty of snowflake crystal under a microscope. This marks the birth of a new form of ready-made, which is neither a craft nor an industrial object, but profound feature of nature, a structure invisible to human eye…We might call this a new ‘aesthetic of fractals.’ (Eco, 2004, p. 405)
