Painting can tackle the sensorial and the sensual and can express the overload of visual information and the minimalist extraction of information by extension of the interpretive and the visual metaphor, whilst being the arbiter of visual information found in the visual tyranny of all social media, the internet and the overkill of over consumption OT digitalisation of our age. It is our root back to humanity and human control today and enlightened by our Painting history its continuity and its network of longevity that we appreciate today! But we warn against visual maximalisation and its toxicity yet prepare for our next cultural intervention, that is anti-didactic but values Paintings' visual compass and its modernistic dialectic.
But today we are recognising visual dismantling and nadir of Painting (1980s) but accept that our visual contribution suffered a visual crisis and breakdown at the tyrannical hands of 'form'! But we are promoting the change in cultural response to induce the very critical exchanges that any modernist era can and always induce. This cultural shift of tectonic plates may be even more controversial because it does not have to encompass the dictatorships of the 1930s/40s and take sides, where Hitler's view was that any modernist Art was 'degenerate' and Stalin's Socialist realism was oppressive of visual creativity within or without the confines of his brutal design!
So here's the rub, tradition, technique, stylisation, and original brushwork still can burst any sacred form'. Protection by the Cold War rhetoric and ideological mutual hatred but now isolated by the Cold War post-structuralist deconstruction is over. We are in an era of realignment and evolving and mutating reconstruction too. But here's what we offer, to visually spear visual disadvantage and exclusion; we are after all the medium of Artists who have espoused and been the victim of visual dogma, and I think are in a unique position to narrate the 21st century burst of visual enlightenment free of any technology and with and in our hands.
We have known cultural shackles ourselves as well as often turned to for an equally balanced debating chamber and forum, frequently involving mutually acrimonious parties and yet have culturally restored and augmented in spite of the fallout of being out of favour by the exclusive non broad church that many don't miss today! Don't get me wrong, we are partisan and subjective but not victims of ‘high mindedness' and snobbery, but we are visual artists who visually sustain a critical agenda per se ready to extoll or ridicule. We have our own visual alphabet and our own longevity or dialectic out of choice that we validate by light and its unique transformative qualities. Our work is often multi-textual and visually tactile, but beyond the sense of touch, legitimately absorbing the total visual experience to connect the human unique eye of the Painter with the unique eye of the viewer, sometimes as a slow burn or sometimes as an immediate instinctive visceral response. What? Doesn't all Art try to do that? Aren't I stating the obvious? Look closer! Don't tell me what you think or feel, just don't stop! Absorb everything or nothing, just like Paint on a canvas! So, is the canvas just a metaphor for….? Why not! No? You decide.
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