Abstract:
Painting has always occupied a space between the material and the ideal, the sensible and the immaterial, in a way that no other art form quite has. With its strangely petrified vitality, a painting is a type of body, a type of subject, while obviously being neither. As a surface more finely sensitised to the passage of thought and feeling than a computer screen, but as dormant as a back door mat, a painting assumes an equivocal disposition. The metaphysical status of the painting as a plane tilting both ways between here and not-here, not-this/not-that, is a beautifully concise equation. For all the phantasmic life an inert sculptural object may summon, and for all the visible difference between a film’s projected illusion and the reality of the projection screen, neither sculpture nor film shuttle so perpetually, so surely, as does a painting between its concrete materiality and its imaginary space, between its physical limits and its apparitional potential. Certainly, as discrete entities we also know how paintings retain their special alchemy as mobile units of value in local and global art economies. A painting is a most conveniently portable concentration of cultural capital. And, as thousands, millions of them pass through the books of dealers and auction houses worldwide, their ubiquity and endless variation are taken by some as evidence of painting’s rude health, of its survivor status in today’s hyper-industrialised world.
