Press Release

Curator's Essay

Images

THE ADVENT OF EXPANDED PAINTING

Before we make an in depth analysis of the actual state of painting, maybe we should ask ourselves a basic question, for instance what would Velazquez's artistic practice be like today?

Has painting become vital again? "It is said that the actual interest -writes David Lillington- is the consequence of 9/11. The art world has panicked and goes back to the most safe, commercial, and conservative art form: painting."

Lillington is partially correct, as the return of painting is generally related to a normal and cyclical process stimulated by boom, decline, fall, and rebirth, on its turn supported by theoretical debates around the supposed death of painting. The endless publicized Schools of Leipzig and Dresden are vivid examples of this comeback and the type of painting that primarily has accompanied it. Is the connection between the 2006 Turner Prize winner-Tomma Abts- and Saatchi's collection just a happy coincidence or a sign of the times? It is rather funny, as every time I think of "The triumph of painting" I can't help but thinking of Jean Cocteau's "Rappel a L'Ordre"...

If the 90's were characterized by "everything is possible as long as it isn't painting", we could easily affirm today that the motto is "everything is possible as long as it is painting". But what kind of painting?

MULTIPLE INCLUSION DIAGRAM (MID)    

In The Expanded Painting Show , curated by Nina Arias and myself for   MASH Miami, we can find some keys to painting's -paraphrasing Thomas Lawson- last exit .

Although presented as "new painting" it doesn't present anything new but a branding exercise that appeals to "germanity" and "german roots".  

This project constitutes the culmination of my work at the Castellon International Expanded Painting Prize located in Castellon, a small coast city 70 kms north from Valencia,. During the first edition in October 2004   I was a member of the jury, and between December 2004 and April 2007 the artistic director of the II and III edition.   Spanish Pablo Alonso was the winner in 2004; Puerto Rican Melvin Martinez won in 2005, and Portuguese Carlos Bunga in 2006. There was an international jury with a.o. Barry Schwabsky, Franz Ackermann, Javier Panera, and Karen Wright.

Finch, Mark New Technology, New Painting? Contemporary Visual Arts, no. 17, pags. 63-66, 1998.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Although presented as "new painting" it doesn't present anything new but a branding exercise that appeals to "germanity" and "german roots".  

This project constitutes the culmination of my work at the Castellon International Expanded Painting Prize located in Castellon, a small coast city 70 kms north from Valencia,. During the first edition in October 2004   I was a member of the jury, and between December 2004 and April 2007 the artistic director of the II and III edition.   Spanish Pablo Alonso was the winner in 2004; Puerto Rican Melvin Martinez won in 2005, and Portuguese Carlos Bunga in 2006. There was an international jury with a.o. Barry Schwabsky, Franz Ackermann, Javier Panera, and Karen Wright.

(1999); Douglas Fogle's The Trouble with Painting ; and Knut Ebeling's Painting Pictures . The expanded concept of the "painterly" was floating in the air, and the term as such has finally made it. And although we are not really sure who can claim authorship , I consider myself instigator and promoter of the term as I had the chance of creating the prize conditions for the participants and publicize them during these years.

Now, where we have no doubt about it is the essay and author that has inspired the adjective: Sculpture in the Expanded Field by Rosalind Krauss, published originally in the journal October , no. 6 (Fall 1978). The cultural context is different, but there are still two premises posed by Krauss that stand up a) the practice of individual artists b) the question of the medium. As of today, amidst the "stertors" of postmodernism, the painter -and the artist in general- assumes an interdisciplinary practice that questions every logic or modernist purity of the medium, which on its turn is no more than a true reflection   of the "information society" we live in.

What do I mean by expanded painting then? For me the answer is very clear: expanded painting has to be understood as the relationship and interaction of painting with other media such as photography, video, installation, sculpture or the digital, and on any kind of support (canvas, DVD, paper, plastic, wood...) .               

Fogle, Douglas The Trouble with Painting exhibitoin catalogue Painting at the Edge of the World   (2001), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, pag. 15.  

Ebeling, Knut "The Men from Mars", Various authors, in exhibition catalogue Painting Pictures. Painting and Media in the Digital Age (2003) at the Wolfsburg Museum, editor Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld.

Prague Biennale 2005 (and 2007) had a section of expanded painting, although 90% of it was devoted to the Dresden and Leipzig Schools, and Chinese Contemporary painting, which is by all means a big contradiction; the last edition too had a section dedicated to expanded painting, but no real expanded painting was there to be seen.  

For the conditions of the International Castellon Expanded Painting Prize see http://certamenpintura.dipcas.es/en/bases.php , and for the FAQs http://certamenpintura.dipcas.es/en/faq.php       

See for example e-flux 15 June 2005, 16 November 2005, 1 June 2006, 21 August 2006, 14 December   2006...

Paintings that have a more traditional look -bidimensional on canvas or acrylic, but in whose process there is at some point software, hardware, or elements from the digital realm: Internet, digital cameras, scanning, Photoshop... In this sense, digital paintings hanged on websites are only valid if they printed out on some support, because if not it would be simple net art.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fogle, Douglas The Trouble with Painting exhibitoin catalogue Painting at the Edge of the World   (2001), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, pag. 15.  

Ebeling, Knut "The Men from Mars", Various authors, in exhibition catalogue Painting Pictures. Painting and Media in the Digital Age (2003) at the Wolfsburg Museum, editor Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld.

Prague Biennale 2005 (and 2007) had a section of expanded painting, although 90% of it was devoted to the Dresden and Leipzig Schools, and Chinese Contemporary painting, which is by all means a big contradiction; the last edition too had a section dedicated to expanded painting, but no real expanded painting was there to be seen.  

For the conditions of the International Castellon Expanded Painting Prize see http://certamenpintura.dipcas.es/en/bases.php , and for the FAQs http://certamenpintura.dipcas.es/en/faq.php       

See for example e-flux 15 June 2005, 16 November 2005, 1 June 2006, 21 August 2006, 14 December   2006...

modernist category sculpture is suspended". From the double negation or pure negativity of kraussian sculpture we proceed to a multiple inclusion or pure positivity of today's painting, which situates us in a completely opposed context. Painting becomes then a "positive condition" that "extends the limits of its traditional place" entering an "all-man´s-land" defined by "a combination of inclusions", exemplified by the set of additions "yes-video, yes-installation, yes-sculpture, yes-photography, yes-performance, yes-digital medium", that generates the "expanded field" between which "today´s category of painting is situated".   

This mutation of genres is due to the fact that actual pictorial practice doesn't reside in its own referentiality, but in visual culture and its creation and reception strategies. Javier Panera got it right in his article "Painting in the era of the promiscuous circulation of images", where "painting has less to do with "the history of painting" and more with "the history of the media". Painting is a state of mind that not only relates to what it means, but also the how it is made.

TECNO-REFERENTIALITY

The most exciting and revolutionary artists to me dealing with this medium are giving birth to what I call techno-referentiality : a context where painting measures itself against its own history and myths while at the same time it deploys interdisciplinary and digital approaches. Ours is a digital moment par excellence :   Internet, mobile phones, PSP, digital cameras, MP3, video cameras, webcams, Photoshop, 3D, printing and digitization technologies. Adam Ross, Vargas Suárez-Universal, Ryan Humphrey, and Dani Marti enlarge by means of the digital the possibilities of the pictorial medium and they open it up to new and different ways of representation.

And paradoxically video has established itself as one of the surprising comrade-in-arms of this techno-referentiality by reprogramming or referencing in a fascinating manner classical works by means of the "painting in movement" concept. Thus, projected works on the wall --Saso Stanojkovic, Yui Kugiyama-, on plasma screens -Tim White-Sobieski- or combined with other media like canvas -Dominik Lejman- not only redefine formal and iconographically the genres -portrait, landscape, still-life-, but tackle key issues such as composition, chromatic texture, brush stroke, flat surface and frame. At the same time, it regains the forgotten pleasure of "contemplation".      

One of the cornerstones of this techno-referential era is undoubtedly the pixel as it allows an analogy between the aesthetics of programs like Photoshop and the pictorial process as such. This brings us to a return and renovation of the debate figuration-abstraction . The works of Chus García-Fraile and Pedro Barbeito relate non-referentiality of abstraction to the low resolution of the pixilated image; the referentiality of representation to high resolution images.

THE NEW SPIRIT OF PAINTING

Panera, Javier Painting in the Era of the "promiscuous"Circulation of Images in catalogue II Internacional Castellon Expanded Painting Prize (2005), pag. 12.Ibid.

We should add to it that the abstraction comes from the digital process, a way of building images completely alien to any form of image production that has become before. The painting presents imagery yet does it through the abstraction of the digital process.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Panera, Javier Painting in the Era of the "promiscuous"Circulation of Images in catalogue II Internacional Castellon Expanded Painting Prize (2005), pag. 12.

Ibid.

We should add to it that the abstraction comes from the digital process, a way of building images completely alien to any form of image production that has become before. The painting presents imagery yet does it through the abstraction of the digital process.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

first we should bear in mind that Rosalind Krauss' article, written in 1978, corresponds to the ideas of French Theory -Delezeu, Guattari, Foucault...- and the "May 68 thought". By then, the idea of capitalism as a "wall", "limit" or "frontier" that had to be trespassed or transgressed was common ground (the culture of "opposition" or "negation").

Today we live in the era of this "new spirit of capitalism" that has been so keenly depicted by French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. On one hand, the demand of unlimited accumulation of capital by means of formally pacific ways remains valid, as well as the ideology that justifies the compromise with capitalism. This affects as well the status and position of the artist that, as a member of a network-based society, assumes the demand of flexibility and mobility, the adoption of different identities -creator/ manager/ facilitator/ communicator- according to the different projects, and

Relation of the artist with the dealer or the gallerist, and with the patron or collector on the other hand.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Ève (2002) El nuevo espíritu del capitalismo , Ediciones Akal, Madrid (English Edition: The New Spirit of Capitalism, 2005, Verso)

Ibid, pag. 35.

Ibid, pag, 41.

This context connects perfectly with the idea of the artist as a "post-producer" -in the sense coined by Bourriaud- that "responds to an increase of the cultural supply", by "inserting his work in that of others and by doing so contributing to abolish the traditional distinctions between production and consumption, creation and copy, ready-made and original work. The material she manipulates isn't anymore raw material. This reprogramming of existing works, inhabiting of styles and historized forms, and the use of images direct the artist amidst the cultural chaos and enables him to deduce new production modes from it.  

Bourriaud, Nicolas Post produccion (2004), Spanish edition Adriana Hidalgo editora, Buenos Aires, pag. 7. (English translation is mine).

Ibid, pags. 8-11. (English translation mine)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bourriaud, Nicolas Post produccion (2004), Spanish edition Adriana Hidalgo editora, Buenos Aires, pag. 7. (English translation is mine).

faded and in return it has reappeared as a tool of accusation of social, political, and cultural alienations. Today as yesterday, the works that have historically stood the test of time are works that reflect on the cultural and social developments of their time.

And what about Velazquez? He would be playing on the computer, shooting photos with his digital camera, and making visual paintings projected on big screens at the latest underground club in the wee hours of the morning.


Paco Barragán