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Painting as verb rather than noun.
Painting between control and accident.
Painting for the beauty of loss as change.

I have been thinking of wether one can paint without submitting the process of painting to a surface statement. If these paintings state anything, it is the tension I experience between the need for historical continuity and the fragmentation of cultural ideas, symbols, stories, and identities. Not that fragmentation wasn’t a condition of the past, but that it has now become a dominant conclusion, or natural state of being. This chaotic sense of multiplicity finds expression in (anti) images with the material: the most tangible, the most immediate element. Composition at the level of matter. What guides the process are principles of execution.

I start with an image. The image as sensation. This determines a directionwhich informs a first action: gesture. Rhythm, texture, and colour as elements determine the form (perpendicular and not parallel to the canvas). What is important is the accident, the aberration as celebration! Whenever an accident intervenes, it must fully take over and significantly change the previously established gesture. Sometimes, the sequence of gestures that ought to follow is clear. Sometimes, only the next gesture is known. Sometimes none at all. All that is known in these occasions has to do with observing and evaluating wether the next gesture is appropriate and to what degree. Sometimes not even this is known, and so I stop painting. I stop moving. Not doing and waiting become the right gestures. Often, the consequence of a gesture upon an established direction requires the destruction of all previous gestures, and by implication, of material (not direction). Destruction is the consequence of a gesture too different from the gestures that led up to it. Similarly, a gesture that becomes too stubborn (no longer open to change) also calls for destruction.

What I am staying with is the processes of moving with material, gesture and direction in time, which may or may not end (it ends when nothing else can be done if not to start over, which is something other than destruction as I mean it). Material requires attention. With each gesture the direction alters. As a consequence, each gesture requires variation.

Painting as verb then, is the bringing about of a right state of affairs betweenmaterial, gesture, and direction in any given moment. Because materials effect in time, painting is time based, and so this bringing about has no end. A painting as noun is but a point in the act of painting.

Painting influences perceptual time. It is important to stay within the time of the paining. Its time is elastic and its tension is given by the interaction of gestures, material, and direction.

Painting gestures should correspond to the state of mind of the painter. The state of mind should be clear, that is: attentive, responsive, and decisive. For gestures to be attentive, responsive, and decisive, the state of mind should not antagonise itself unless antagonism is the chosen principle of execution, where one must forget one has chosen so and simply become so, in which case, gestures will likely become schizophrenic. On the other hand, antagonism between gesture, material, and direction requires control, which expresses tension, conflict. Without conflict there is no meaningful change. In any case, if the state of mind is confused, imprecise, indecisive, gesture will record this.

Painting while developing new gestural and material techniques invariably leads to mistakes. Mistakes of this sort are mistakes in thinking and execution (wrong predictions, miscalculations, sloppiness, wanting skill). Mistakes are necessary. The source of learning and correction.

Painting, as any art, is informed by composition principles, which are in principle restrictions. The above principles determine how one paints and not what one paints. Although the two are inseparable, the emphasis is on the first.

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Crimsons of flesh and muscles.

Prune, mauve, red, blue, black, shadows, whole colour fields, slight film, not gloss but reflective.
Depth. To get lost in. Details that can’t be seen, that can be seen, only some times.

Salmon, pinks, whites.
Luminous blacks, manic reds.