Abstract:
So many paintings for me appear like images on my iphone swipe right, swipe right, yet others stop me in my tracks, their pull on me is primal. Subconsciously, I see myself in such works, they inspire me. I have empathy with them for artistic, historical and also personal reasons. To make sense of this aura, I will discuss the past, the present leading to where I see the future of painting combining with computer software, the Internet and fractional and collapsable grids. Nearly a century ago aura, a subject discussed in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), connected to authenticity in a work of art being uniquely present in time and space. With reproduction the work is never fully present and authenticity disappears and the original and its authority are devalued. The viewer is brought close-up with the image at differing sizes, which adds to the loss of aura. Today, Benjamin’s argument still has value but many would say that this is no longer so important as people travel and see things more readily. More importantly, the scale of reproduced image and it’s availability, mean that one cannot just assume Benjamin’s argument applies today just as he said it did many decades ago. To begin, I will reflect on two works that I have personally stood in front of and shared space with. I feel this will be a more authentic discussion and will give insight to my own practice and its concerns with light, colour, frame and assemblage. The two works are Caravaggio’s painting Supper at Emmaus (1601), in the National Gallery London, and Judy Millar’s recent work, Rock Drop (2017), in the Auckland City Art Gallery. Both activate space and have taken me into thoughts on liminal space. In art it takes only minor changes to break through into another space; we all want to be on the threshold of something new that can create an emotional response in others.