A canvas is normally open and offering possibilities without subject matter or stylistic imposition or dogmatic state (or anti-state extremist) standardisation of what or how to paint. But there is no room for getting greedy, bored, opportunistic, or derivative because of the very nature of low-tech human hand version-based use of Paint...unless your sole intention is just to copy someone else’s work! That is called plagiarism. But in Paintings that are or are not the above, you the Painter, cannot hide behind high tech (not the Artists fault) by either tech malfunction or some practical application that does not refer to the quality of the Art work, because there is no escape for any Painter!! It is the ultimate exposure and the ultimate loyalty test to the medium! You do not and cannot hide behind over analysis or technique of every brush stroke!
But what would we do in a world without any Painting? I believe that conceptual and tech Art exists in a symbiotic way with Painting, but at an expense of Painting to self-justify the technology and technique and the materials used - it says we're not Painters' is enough to pacify those who assume any tech or idea Art is contemporary because 'they are not yesterday’s Art'! To med, that is a false allegation and a fake representation of all Art, and is in fact parasitic, exploitative and unjust, and unfaithful to the future when tech becomes too oppressively air-brushed and distant from the actual fingerprint of the Artist!
Our today is not about social class, race, sexuality, disability, identity via tech, our enemy is the 3Dprinter, Al and mass production overkill, where cynicism is permitted to delimit potential coupled with ideologically based takes on 'form', or agendas of self-promotion and careerism! We could be romantics and idealists contextualised into cynical chaos and brutality and shameless aggression of a world whose globalised power is only self-destructive but not irreparable without having to press the Luddite button as a fist reaction! We converge not to reduce or take a protective-negative position (actually Conceptual Art and its revolving materials are the very essence of protectionism via monopoly status), but to diversify and illuminate that fertile unique subject matter, colour range and non-repetition! We accept copyists (low level plagiarists) by choice by our personal and political non-production line mantra of " to start alone and then finish for each other'! We are simply reflecting a play on 'realism' and the realistic approach when we see our Art appearing to respond like it is a depiction of some sci-fiction feared and predicted in the 1980's actually being literally like it to today's world! Our realistic approach is sci-fi or surreal because we have replicated 'what is going on in the world today! These are new upgrades of our visual experience! You do not need to have heightened sense or take a narcotic when today our world resembles what my recently passed mother would call such a nature 'weird'! Weird is good, weird is true! Why not paint this world but in a way of both appreciating and satirising multi-media and social media out of control kaleidoscope that is used as a weapon against human social interaction, without tech in your face, or in the grip but out of your hands spiralling out of your ability to master! At least Painting does not need somebody else or something else of some over sophisticated digital mechanism to actually undertake or fake!
Beware but dare to accept the risk that accompanies us like a permanent inside shadow even if it means recognising that 'form' based Art is not our adjudicator, but your originality is! Perhaps we are traditionalists who've have been placed by accident into this epoch to' come out of our shells to stop the Painting medium from being historicised by an aggressive Painting Art market that rejects contemporary Painting to impose its historical relevance and status and 'antique inflated Art ‘handing the medium into the hands of exclusive clientele to establish 'purchase status-value' to restrict the medium by prestige only of the past (the exceptions prove the rule) and therefore to increase financial value!. Distance from the Artist Painter from the present era of sale and not just the quality of the Painting or its contextual importance, defines its value'!
In opposition to that interference by market value, we do not judge or conspire! Our unspoken principle is to withdraw from the Painting, but to be ready to make a legitimate defence of it if necessary! Indeed, the very structuralist and post structuralist argument of the 1980's that imposed Painting’s elimination from the 'avant-garde", its semantic and semiotic preoccupations that were meant to offend Soviet absolutism and its world of factories of Painters ,may well have been victorious in undermining 'Soviet superior Marxist ideology', but they may have damaged the West still today! Perhaps we are more phlegmatic about it today, more pragmatic and more flexible, but our emergence from the 'form' based paradox of the Cold War may well have rebounded on us!
In fact, although we sacrificed our Western cultural accountability and rendered Sovietism no longer sustainable without Capitalism, did we just re-finance Soviet two-systems China and upgrade technology in Russia that is led by its invasion of Ukraine? If we want to change that we will have to frame a new type of cultural Western approach, like inducing our most critical weapon of Art-...Painting! But to re-connect with our most viable confrontation against unaccountability that has performed beyond the 1930's attempt to devalue it! Hitler's view of it being degenerate' should tell us how much our renewed but definitely 21st century modernist Painters can sustain a permanent cultural legitimacy that can lay bare any over centralisation and subjugation of free Artistic expression as the lungs and heart of real democracy! This is no cultural virus or a trick of number crunching or some gimmick but a meaningful attempt to front and back-channel all that wish to be rid of a haze of either well-hidden or not so concealed state excess and totalitarian behaviour! This is a contemporary issue that new materials or tech will just distract. It is not about cultural collapse but about re-emergence and reconstruction, both as a new era and as an acknowledgement of the dangers and rewards of spin as well as a and a rejection of 1980's deconstruction. At least this is about revealing their mass production of control by 21s century imperialism, mass nationalism and territorialism that is attempting to redefine an identity that belongs to a 19th century version of anachronistic world! Perhaps 1990s'freeing-up meaning and content was a wayward but vital post-Cold War gain, whilst closing down Painting in a world run by hegemony oligarchy and a wild -East of multilateralism was a wasteful bi-product. That 30/40 years on should speak to us today of a new departure needed to resurrect a non-global cultural exhibit that is not financially all consuming as the only criterion for cultural exchange!
How would this new era of Painting work?
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