What are paintings supposed to do in 2019? How do they function? How does work on a canvas compete with installation art that moves and transmits, performance art that has at its center a moving or a screeching or a silent body?
I think we look to visual (painting on canvas) art to give us the same sensations as installation and performance and I think very few painters have come as close to doing this is Francis Bacon.
In Deleuze’s meditation on Bacon’s work titled, The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze explores many facets of Bacon’s paintings that prove Bacon is tapping into sensation. One only has to see a Bacon (the distorted figure, the semi-circular grounding of flat color—often orange or pink—the screaming pope encased, the meat and the bones on the crucifix) to recognize this.
I feel that I do not have this capacity (to tap into sensation) or, at least, it is not inherent in the portrait work that I do. Or, if it is, I am unaware of it. My work, I feel, is directly related to stories. When someone looks at one of my portraits, I believe the physicality of the subject (the dress, the skin, the pose, the furniture) should tell the subject’s story or the story of the sitting—which, itself, is often ripe with psychological Easter eggs.
But I have no clue what the reception of my portraits is to the viewer. Do they touch sensation and I am unaware of this? Do they, in some way convey the story of the person or the session?
The tricky part also, for me, can be expressed in a quote from Deleuze that suggests these two things are counter intuitive: “Sensation is that which is transmitted directly and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story” (32).
This art of avoiding boring people with the work is part of the work I think we are all doing as artists: how do we create work that speaks to people without shouting at them?
For instance, I had conceptualized an idea of painting the portraits of white people living in Harlem (gentrifiers) in their homes and titling the work with their addresses. When I was talking to a friend who is not an artist, he suggested the same message (or sensation) could be better accomplished with painting a white person standing below the Apollo theater. I tried to convey to my interlocutor that this sounded boring: the message was being shouted at the viewer and it loses the opportunity for sensation. But my friend insisted that this was the better way to go.
I am starting to understand that sensation (and story) are best conveyed through a trusting of one’s instincts and through a spirit of experimentation and balancing one’s work between the story and the sensation.
Currently, I am appropriating the archives of my family album and working strictly with sensation to tell stories or to tell truth. I do not want to speak to much about he project because i do not want to fall into the trap of producing work that is flat and boring. The work speaks to family, family roles, inheritance, history, memory, truth, and mythology.
