Does art think?
Art is truth. This is an affirmation in which I believe. However affirmations give rise to questions. Whether or not art thinks is my primary inquiry.
I paint to address the question of thinking and the potential nonhumanity of the near future; a seemingly inevitable historicization exceeding the inhumane. Art must not become an entirely historical reprise. Whether an artist likes it or not “the artist is driven” in this way.
When painting I engage the substrate with deference to what is abstract to thought and the meditative act which immediately follows. I delay the conceptual phase, I avoid technical supremacy as emphases, opting for resemblances of the initial abstract I cannot plan in advance.
Similar to poetry subject matter is secondary, in the sense that I do not intend it as much as it is offered freely from an unknown. I readily admit to a mystification by this which, if over-indulged, would reduce the potential glimpse of thinking.
Undoubtedly the objects we call art inevitably concern illusion. Yet illusion guards the full exhibition of truth in art. Illusion and truth, so it seems, are tied to the same source. In this way illusion guards the truth from conceptual destruction. For example, when illusion appears as truth, art degrades into propaganda. When art is seemingly (if not entirely conceptualized) it portends art will come to an end.
Both propaganda and the end of novel art are illusions which we could believe. Yet I create art to move beyond such toward fulfillment. Fulfillment concerns the affirmation of truth in art. For truth is superior to illusion when it concerns thinking.
The truth is – in part – we know something about our thoughts and very little about the thinking which pervades individual consciousness. Painting is a way to care for thinking and thought.
Care is particular to a contemporary lack of vision and any hope for a unified reality of consensus. For it seems common sense has fallen further under the governance of technologies considered intelligent if not quasi-autonomous. The problem is thus ‘how’ one confronts these illusions. If a painting, like a poem thinks, then it is of an intelligence which indicates a potent autonomy superior to common sense associated with contemporary technologies, in particular those governing the social.
Historically art has both destabilized and reestablished common sense. And here the question turns to ‘how’. Therefore the question – does a painting think? – takes further form. Yes, it thinks. It invites us to think for ourselves not by illusion rather, what is currently denuding our sense for an essential abnormal or unreal; a reclamation of our capacity to view by the imagination.