Aspectpainting

Mixed-Media auf Leinwand

Technik:

Malerei

Versand:

Die Arbeit wird aufgespannt auf einem Keilrahmen versendet – inklusive Echtheitszertifikat und Signatur auf der Rückseite.

Concept:

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

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

A found object, to qualify as such, must be ordinary and encountered accidentally rather than sought out. In my view, painting—many times pronounced dead since the arrival of photography, yet still ubiquitous and the default mental image of “art”—can be relevant today only as a found object: something discovered and made meaningful through recontextualization rather than through traditional notions of craft or intentional creation.

The landscape also engenders what I call the workers’ sublime—the awe at the sheer labor embedded in the piece: the detail, the craft, 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 proper—a painter’s fleece used in a studio to protect floors and tables from paint and primer. Discarded as a byproduct of the art-making process, it nevertheless possesses, in my opinion, aesthetic qualities surpassing those of intentional artworks. 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 have both processes present in a single work, I left the landscape in a studio where painting workshops regularly take place. I wanted the people using the space to treat the canvas as protective covering. After nearly a year, however, there was 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 recognized as art, lost its capacity to become a by-product.

To make it evident, 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.