As a very quiet medium, painters use painting as a language to depict abstracted memory and their interpretation of recent history. Nowadays most people are using painting as a conceptual tool but they are not embracing painting they are just using paint. In most conceptual paintings the artists are not actually related to it, they are not loyal to it and they are not invested in it. They are most concerned with a sense of logic, methodology and conceptual ideas. There are artists using painting as the sake of conceptual ideas but they are actually destroying it. On the other extreme, there is the ‘painterly’ painter who is highly invested in the exploration the painting medium and not as much invested in the conceptual value. They are dedicated to the medium. How do we define ourselves within the scale of these two extremes within the intellectual discourse of conceptual art? So there artists that are trying to consider the future use of the medium with a deep concern for current issues related to humanity and intellectual discourse. All of these concerns actually can be equally focused on together in the future progress of painting. It not longer is just that he or she is just a painter but that they are contemporary artists. We want to be taken seriously, we want be responsible and aware of the current conditions of humanity. The biggest distinction between contemporary painting and other form of contemporary art is that in most conditions painting couldn’t be explained in the sense of logic. For example, you can make bad paintings and somehow this is a relevant and fruitful to the discourse of conceptual art but not to the future of painting. Cezanne is a very conceptual painter. But his work isn’t just about ideas but more about humanity. The mystery of painting is that, it is never the illustration of philosophical ideas. They could be paralleled, but never the tool of explaining each other. Just like what the Japanese Buddhist D.T.Suzuki has said about Zen: You can’t explain Zen in the form of logic.
OPENING: Tuesday October 30, 6-8pm
