Painting’s Paradox

The artist, John Torreano, wrote to me about painting’s paradox, “Paintings are essentially two-dimensional. But they are also three-dimensional. They are made from physical "material." By degree they are thin, low relief, sculptures. From the flatness of Fra Angelico frescos or Botticelli egg temperas to the assemblages of Picasso or Rauschenberg the aesthetic essence of painting remains in how its meanings are communicated two-dimensionally. For painters the contradistinction between paintings' two-dimensional aesthetic value and its materiality of means will always be the compelling mystery….”  

In addition to painting’s two-dimensional aesthetic values and its materiality paradox, there are other paradoxes at work within paintings and drawings. Painting and drawings are immediate, mysterious, complex, flat worlds, unmoving. They are worlds unlike the time-based arts—performance, music, film, theatre, video, and dance, or the word-based arts—poetry, short stories, memoirs, or novels.

The time and word-based arts, in contrast, reveal themselves in a manner similar to the way they we created—in a sequence of events, evolving over time. Viewers/readers experience the work in the same way, in a trajectory of bits and parts in duration. These arts are created and appreciated in a way that is similar, although, not always in the same order.

In contrast, paintings/drawings reveal themselves all at once. Paintings/drawings do not move or change as the viewer experiences the work.. A viewer reads a painting/drawing in the opposite fashion from time-based and word-based art. Viewers see the picture first as a whole and the parts are a secondary feature, comprehended upon close examination and reflection. As viewers experience the work, the picture may reveal surprises, insights, or evoke comprehension and understanding sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but these insights belong to the viewer; the artist placed everything they had to say on the flat picture surface, albeit in a sequence of events, and what is there is there all at once.

Accordingly, viewers always experience paintings and drawings in the present moment. The painter made the work sequentially, in the theatre of time, leaving the marks, choices, and actions on the flat picture surface. The viewer sees these decisions first as a whole, grasping in consciousness, in the immediacy of the present moment, all the parts as they relate to the whole. 

Paintings and drawings, therefore, present a paradox for both the observer and the artist. For the observer, a painting/drawing appears as a simultaneous, often illusionistic, cohesive world. When an observer sees, comprehends, and assigns meanings to a painting/drawing image, the observer does so without reading the parts that make up the whole; instead, the observer sees the whole of which the parts are contributors.

Everything the viewer reads in a painting/drawing arises first from the surface on which the material and parts exist in relationship to the whole painting/drawing. All the perspective illusions, all the apparent spatial locations, all the details, and the light, reflections, everything is there before the viewer, all at once, on the picture surface, there to contemplate, discover, enjoy, embrace, reject, or resist.

For the artist, however, the world the viewer sees is not the world the artist made all at once. Instead, the artist makes a painting/drawing incrementally, over a period, as a process. Because a painting/drawing evolves over time, each moment of its creation is a new realization, a new ground, a ground where all the factors are re-configured. As the relationships develop, the artist continues to adjust the configuration until the artist decides to stop, sign the work or not, and let it go into the world.

As David Salle wrote, 

“Painting is both slow and fast – it tells its story all at once. Its parts demand to be seen in no sequence; it isn’t necessary to see one part before going to the next. This ‘all over-ness’ is something fundamental to painting – and only to painting. It would be nuts to want to give up the immediacy of which painting is capable.” 

NOTES: 

See David Salle in Sunil Manghani, “The influence of cinema on painting,” Journal of Contemporary Painting, Volume 1/ Number 1, 2015, Intellect Limited, Bristol, UK, pg. 134

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273338188_The_influence_of_cinema_on_painting 

I considered this topic and other perceptual ideas in my article, “Michael Torlen on John Torreano,” painters_on_paintings, August 24, 2018, https://paintersonpaintings.com/michael-torlen-john-torreano/