Representation Of, Representation As

Without the emergence of distance between representation and what is being represented, representation could not appear. These new paintings* attempt to explore that distance.

These new paintings* employ “unsolicited diagrams” as a radical system of research, to expose the tasks and associated problems of painting. These diagrams sneak behind the paint, interrupting patterns of painting’s idiom that have long been reinforced. The resulting offspring is recognizably paint on canvas, yet also monstrous and different. A new type of painting emerges through the exchange, and you don’t know what this new type is. Visual experience? Semantic form? You really don’t know.

Understanding modern painting depends on a traditional idiom of imitation, abstraction, deconstruction, and material form- used collectively to represent a condition of experience. Thus, modern painting reinforces problematic dualities (subject vs. object; ideality vs. reality; content vs. form) which regulate and sustain the scholarship of painting. But this traditional dialectic (of demonstrating a representation separate from what is being represented) places a fundamental limitation on painting’s capacity for truth-telling. My pieces attempt to, at once, unite the traditional dualisms of painting- such that the representation of an idea, too becomes the idea-- omitting less.

Unlike painting, the diagram is precontextual, organized before experience, and has the strange and curious power of transmitting information without arbitration. Diagrams are able to knit content with form in a seamless way, yet are commonly bound by a vocabulary of convention (coordinate, point, line, text). In these diagrams* one cannot ignore the primitive physical reality of painted canvas, shifting the diagram from a noiseless supportive role to an autonomous art object. It is from this position that I experiment with elevating the diagram through painting; mutating the painting through diagram.

And these mutations, make us hesitate.

Can a painting ever be less than a painting? more?
Each piece asks the interpreter: am I a painting? And the answer could easily be: no.
Or the answer could be: wait a minute.

Just as metaphor uses language to come before and go beyond the structure of language, so these new paintings* come before and go beyond the structure of painting. These ironic works should decentralize the viewer, placing them in an architectural state between representation and what is being represented; a diagrammatic condition.

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