Paintings relationship with technology

Rainald Schumacher is an independent art critic, writer and curator based in Berlin. He is the director of Ester Schipper Gallery and head curator of the Goetz Collection.

The text ‘Imagination Becomes Reality’ is part of a series of 5 books that make up the exhibition catalogue for the renowned Goetz Collection. “Conceived and planned by Ingvild Goetz it present visitors with a selection of the wide variety of forms and techniques in use by contemporary painters. Painting Surface Space, the second of five books that bring the series to viewers not within visiting distance, focuses on the ways architecture and space are rendered in contemporary art, and the ways electronic media, photography, film and computer simulations, in expanding the means we can employ to design and visualize space, have influenced painting. This interaction of media, ultimately almost always in connection with our state of mind, or with space as a metaphor for such an existential orientation, is at the heart of the juxtapositions this exhibition presents. Thus Painting Surface Space taps into space and architecture in the context of the development of painting as a medium.” (good reads, June 15) I think the text draws interesting parallels between different topics. For me I saw a connection between this text and abstract art and how I use different computer based processes to break-apart and re-assemble an image.

Artists, such as myself, and the ones featured in ‘Time-spaces inside the three dimensions’, explore new ways to interpret life. Instead of painting reality, as it is, the development of technology, such as film and photography have altered our way of picture making. “Film has fundamentally altered our perception of processes within space and, with that, has radically changed our perception of time.”(27, Imagination Becomes Reality’) Therefore artists are inspired to create abstracted and fragment images to create a new style of picture making.

Abstract art is generally inspired by reality but does not picture reality; instead it makes a new form of visual reality. (Abstract Art, 50) Textures, colours, shape and line are combined to create a non-representational image. Abstract painting can visualize an experience, it can reveal to us things we feel about the world, certain abstracts about our condition, rather than simply reproducing what we already know.

Michael Rush in New Media and art states, “In art, visual literary is no longer limited to ‘the object.’ It must embrace the fluid ever-changing universe that exists inside the computer and the new world that can be virtual in its reality and radically independent in its incorporation of ‘the viewer’ into the completing of the work of art.” (183)

Since we live in a time where realistic pictures dominate, abstractions prove to be challenging, they allow the viewer to ‘fill in the gaps’ to help them piece together the work in their own mind. The viewer has freedom to discover the depth, view and the true perspective of the works. They bring their own knowledge and experiences to form a personal understanding of what the art means and shows. You are allowed the freedom to create a personal story of what it means in your own mind. “Our individual view and perception of our everyday surroundings runs parallel to the scientifically objective view of reality. It is this individual view that determines our notion of space and spatially. Verticals and horizontals, flat planes, rectangular surface shapes and geometrically precise forms are crucial factors in our perception of space with the everyday landscape setting.” (Imagination becomes reality, 27)

Virtual technology in Time Square altered the way I saw space in a real environment. Within my practice I disassemble an image to create a space that is informed by reality rather than of actually reality. In ‘The Anomalous space of picture’ Rose Woodcock discusses the significance of virtual reality technology on painting. “Virtual imaging technologies and painting share a history of the representation of space. Photorealistic Virtual Reality arguably has borrowed from the observational sensitivities of painters to the behaviour of light, colour, shadow and form within the framed visual field. The history of painting- both representational and non representational- is largely an argument about space; the push and pull, into and out from the picture plane through the modelling of form creates the illusion of space as depth in painting.” (51)

This text incorporated a few different concepts that I am interested in within my own practice. That technology such as photography and science have influence contemporary painters specifically within the creation of space within an image. As a contemporary painter I think it is important to retain the past traditions but also to embrace the developments that technology has bought. Because paintings are in a sense a snapshot, it is important to me to incorporate movement and vibrancy into a flat surface.

Imagination Becomes Reality: Painting Surface Space." Good Reads. Web. 15 June 2010. http://216.74.34.10/book/show/188405.Imagination_Becomes_Reality_Painting_Surface_Space

Moszynska, Anna. Abstract Art. New York, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Print

Rush, Michael. New Media in Art. 2nd ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Print.

Schumacher, Rainald. “Time-Spaces – Inside the Three Dimensions.” Imagination Becomes Reality: Ein Ausstellungszyklus Zum Bildverständnis Aktueller Kunst: Imagination Becomes Reality Wird 2007 Als Kooperation Im ZKM, Museum Für Neue Kunst in Karlsruhe Gezeigt Werden 2 Painting Surface Space: Julian Göthe, Eberhard Havekost, Lothar Hempel, Teresa Hubbard, Alexander Birchler, Frank Nitsche, Veron Urdarianu; [17. Oktober 2005 - 14. Januar 2006]. Eds. Schumacher, Rainald and Göthe, Julian. München, Goetz, 2005. 24-29.

Woodcock, Rose. "The Anomalous Space of Pictures." Frameworks, Artworks, Place- The Space of Perception in the Modern World. Ed.Tim Mehigan. New York: Rodopi, 2008. 43-66