Linear times in painting: (self-)exile - Acca
To speak of painting is to speak of historical tradition, and currently, in the definition of the latter, the stigma comes included as standard. Painting as such (we speak of painting when we treat the concept “painting” as a format of definition within an artistic category) has been one of the great hits of the Art world. The history of Art or the creation of Art cannot be understood without those concepts so deeply rooted in the collective imaginary: painting and sculpture. They are the first two “techniques” you are asked about when some stranger finds out about your work: “-Ah! You work in Art? And what do you do? Painting or sculpture?”. Some bold soul dares to ask whether it is “video” upon seeing an inevitably strange look on your face…
Painting as such, and therefore a way of understanding that Art is made through it, occurs for several reasons. First, because of the long historical tradition of Art with this form and language, which has succumbed to the idea of Art itself as technique, preciosity and delicacy. Second, and after that popularisation, because the world of painting became (until the democratisation of photographic cameras) a way of portraying a “reality”, a way of capturing an instant, a way of “manufacturing” an image that speaks for itself, that injects information into us, and this awareness of revealing a truth and making it remain immune to time has always belonged to a sphere of society quite distant from what we can consider mundane. The very appreciation of it has signified a baggage of sensibility, a knowing how to appreciate the aesthetic, a symbol of power.
After the popularisation and democratisation of photographic images as ways of portraying a moment we believe important (weddings, deaths, parties or other celebrations that deserved to be immortalised), the current proliferation of the capture of “realities” through devices has made society master techniques that were previously considered exclusive to painting. Filters, glazes, frames or deformed images have made us see that there is a way of creating a personalised reality, and of making a portrayed moment something even more “beautiful”. We have learned to “aestheticise” quickly, and we have also learned that without the validation of that creation, it makes no sense to carry out such interventions on the images we create. Joan Fontcuberta calls this “post-photography”, a new way of understanding the meaning of photography today, after the creation of thousands of images per second.
The system is basically the same in almost all media spheres: -I capture an image, I apply one or more filters to it, I “post” it on one of my social networks, and the more “likes” it has, the prouder I will be of such a creation. Creation, visibilisation and validation, a way of creating a reality.
This chronological format in time (ever shorter), which conjugates continuous and vertiginous realities, called mediatisation, has accelerated our capacity to read images, and we have learned to carry out aesthetic formulas that turn special moments into others even more special.
Nevertheless, and returning to painting as a concept and a capture of reality (and as a technique, let us not deceive ourselves), it seems to have survived against many of the languages that arose from the creation and subsequent popularisation of the media. Beginning with Nam June Paik and ending with Pipilotti Rist, the creation of digital images has caused an uprooting of painting through the media stigmas. Painting seemed something old-fashioned, a language that once made sense but no longer does.
However, painting as such has always been there as one of the formats that have related creation, reflection and contemplation in a single state.
The idea of observing may seem very distant to us, but through contemplation and patient observation of Art, we can (re)discover the world of creation from another point of view.
For that reason, in order to keep learning to look at painting, I went to the production centre in Barcelona “La Escocesa”, and there I met Marco Noris.
Marco Noris treats painting as a way of learning about himself; he needs to speak to himself as such in order to learn from himself. He has gone through many of the states of (self-)struggle that a reflective person must have throughout their life trajectory, from the conception of the portrait as a way of commemorating someone or something, to painting for painting’s sake as a way of losing the fear of the internal expression that holds respect for the responsibility that painting entails.
Noris is aware of the task of being an artist, or of devoting oneself to the Art world: above all he is aware of the commitment involved in representing and disseminating an image that contains information. The project he is currently working on, called “The Century of Rivesaltes”, represents pictorial images through images of the concentration camp that housed exiled Spaniards, among others.
The project does not intend to be a theoretical investigation as such, but to create a visceral sensation in the viewer, “a journey to memory”, as Noris himself narrates in his statement.
Beyond the pictorial representation itself of a dramatic event, Noris explores how the form of linear and chronological time within the field of art, works that find comfort in the same period and space. Noris tells me that chronological time becomes a way of hierarchising events, setting aside the past to let the present flood everything, when time as such means coexisting with facts that contain events that in one way or another constitute a present, because there are spaces that contain those facts, and people who remember them.
Nevertheless, that migration of thousands of exiles to other parts of the world, for various reasons, mostly ideological and therefore political, makes the subject burning from a social point of view. I do not want to focus only on the painful situation (social, labour, cultural, political, of values…) of this context, but on the idea of self-exile that many of us suffer day after day, although the current one basically arises for economic causes. A way of isolating oneself from a world full of ways of perceiving things that many of us do not share, and therein lies the form of defeated ostracism of the human being, voluntarily. To not be, or to be in disagreement with, the norms in force, with laws that trace our way of understanding life from a contemporary perspective, that tell us what and how we must act and live under a regime that governs our way of perceiving the right thing and the path to follow, from our work to our partner, by way of having a house and a mortgage, one or two children. An occurrence that does not only happen in our country, but on other continents and in other contexts, with people who see that (self-)exile as necessary. For that reason the (self-)exile, the voluntary ostracism, painting as learning and contemplation as a way of revealing ourselves before things.