Stephen Felton: Whether painted or printed, representative information is what you are in the end

If it is a fact that the most relevant two-dimensional artworks of our time can be easily divided into two separate categories – the painted and the printed ones -, it is also to be noticed that despite many artists and movements during the last one hundred years have tried to produce “concrete” art, thus art that doesn’t represent any specific object, or emotion, or theory for that matter, representation is still, in any case, the purpose at the basis of any “flat” artwork.

 

It follows that the first relevant element the beholder ought to take into consideration while looking at a certain artwork concerns its potential uniqueness. The case of a painting by Mark Rothko, for example, is completely different from the one by Wade Guyton, even if both artists are characterized by a very homogeneous style of painting. Furthermore, in both instances, there is the big question the beholder can’t avoid to ask himself when staring at their canvases: what is the artist doing over this surface? And by answering this inevitable question he will discover that accepting representation is much easier than struggling to escape it.

 

Once accepted that representation is a basic function – at least for any two-dimensional artwork, either painted or printed –, and after a quick glance at the tradition of representation in painting and replicable images, it won’t be difficult anymore to grasp what artists are doing nowadays and why some of their artworks are so original and necessary to art history even when we commit the capital sin of looking at them simply as replicas of prototypes we already are familiar with.

 

At the beginning of western art, artists were called to represent with images the holy books, in order to enable even those who couldn’t read able to understand the meanings of the holy writs. At that time, and since religion was the main commitment of images, they were representing an ideal reality, derived from a specific group of books. Then a new element was introduced when artists started to look at reality taking it as a model, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, or Caravaggio. Once started, this path continued up to the mid of the XIX century, when painters turned to themselves, so to represent not only the reality, and its values, but how a certain human being “perceived” it.

 

From this point the step forward seems to come rather easily: artists didn’t pay any more attention to representation, in fact they tried to avoid it altogether. Nevertheless, they actually ended up representing exactly this attempt, or indeed all the theories that were developed in order to avoid representation in favour of abstraction. But abstraction is representative in itself. Hence the process of perception, and to give meaning to what we see, works essentially as a representation, only depending upon the viewer and not the artist. During the Fifties artists addressed to the sky, and science, but that was nothing really new in term of representation, even if they called themselves “abstract artists”, and the same happened when they switched their focus toward ethics and politics.

 

On the contrary, the great revolution have been taking place since our personal space was enriched with the virtual side, that is to say when our system of communication was extended to the possibility of generating multiple identities for each individual human being. The amount of information we are able to process have increased enormously in the last decades, and this new universe of our existence is taking up a considerable part of our life. Let’s put it in this way: there was a time in which you need to grab your spear, and go to the forest to hunt for your meal. Then came the butcher, and you had to work so to make money to pay him. Now there is the web, and if you are a wise person, you would spend your time searching online for the best butcher in your area and to carefully select the kind of meat is most suitable to your diet. So, what do you think the artists are representing nowadays?

July 21, 2015