Aspectpainting

:

Mixed media on canvas

Technique:

Painting

Delivery:

The artwork will be shipped stretched onto a stretcher frame – including a certificate of authenticity and the artist’s signature on the reverse.

Concept:

This painting continues a series of works exploring the medium’s identity in contemporary art. Like earlier pieces, it does so by examining questions of authorship, agency, free will, originality and labour.

The upper section is an original painting depicting an abandoned village, a common sight in Eastern Europe caused by urbanisation and an ageing population. Similar to the landscapes of the eighteenth-century ‘picturesque’ tradition, it presents a type of ruin: dilapidated barns, a plot of land, and a road overgrown with wildflowers and tall grass. This ruin is the result of environmental forces taking over following human abandonment. It evokes a sense of mystery, aligning with W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of the ‘picturesque’ as a found object.

To qualify as such, a found object must be ordinary and encountered by chance rather than sought out. In my view, painting—which has been declared dead many times since the advent of photography, yet remains ubiquitous and is still the default mental image of ‘art’—can be relevant today only as a found object: something discovered and made meaningful through recontextualisation rather than through traditional notions of craft or intentional creation.

The landscape also evokes what I call the ‘workers’ sublime’—a sense of awe at the sheer labour embedded in the piece: the detail, the craftsmanship, the time. This effect is amplified by the shock of witnessing its ‘spoilage’ through paint smudges and drips. In this sense, the landscape is a double ruin.

The lower section is a found object in its own right—a painter’s fleece used in a studio to protect floors and tables from paint and primer. Discarded as a by-product of the art-making process, it nevertheless possesses, in my opinion, aesthetic qualities that surpass those of intentional works of art. This reframes art-making through Jon Elster’s notion of states that are essentially by-products—something that only occurs as a result of actions taken for other purposes, and cannot be intentionally created because attempting to do so prevents the state from being achieved.

To incorporate both processes into a single work, I left the landscape in a studio where painting workshops are regularly held. I wanted the people using the space to treat the canvas as a protective covering. After nearly a year, however, there had been little progress. People were self-conscious. The smudges and marks they left were sparse and unconvincing. The opposite of what I had hoped for happened—the landscape, being recognised as art, lost its capacity to become a by-product.

To make this clear, I stitched the canvas together with a real painter’s fleece, exposing the clash between the agency of an autonomous artist and the agency of a subjugated environment. The resulting simultaneous contrast invites a ‘duck-rabbit’ perceptual shift, challenging assumptions about work, artwork, freedom and originality.