New illusionism: painting in the time of the screen
Lead Research Organisation:
Royal College of Art
Department Name: School of Art and Humanities
Abstract
With a resurgent interest in painting and the proliferation of the Internet (The Hole, New York's 2017 exhibition Post-Analog Painting II and Post-Digital Pop at The Garage, Amsterdam 2019), the question of what is truly ground-breaking in the coupling of painting and ubiquitous technologies needs to be seriously considered. This practice-led research (painting) works with entanglement and radical matter as research areas, which focus on the materialisation of ephemera / phenomena, led by Professor Johnny Golding at RCA. My hypothesis is that by problematising circulation, complexity and multiplicity, a radically different approach to contemporary painting emerges: one that foregrounds entanglement [Barad: 2007, 2015], diffraction [Haraway: 2016], incompleteness/fractal materiality [Golding: 2014, 2016] and the figural [Lyotard: 2003].
Significantly, this research will build on Abstract Illusionism, an American painting style in which abstract works were rendered with a sense of depth and shadow and defined by their "paradoxical" flatness and illusory non-flatness [Rose: 1967]. This reconciling of illusion with flatness arguably pre-empted the infinitely "deep", super-smooth surface of the digital screen: an understanding which has so far been neglected. This research complicates the binary of flat/not-flat through the addition of multiple planes (figurative, narrative, decorative, textural) and by locating and respecting the contemporary resurgence of trompe l'oeil and skeuomorphism, further deceiving the viewer about the nature of texture or space. In this way, painting is not just flat and not- flat but working in multiple, simultaneous dimensions that are both deceptive and imaginary. This new type of illusionism may well be the single common denominator linking the most advanced painting being done today.
Understanding the visual impact of the digital on painting also means engaging with the conversation of the Internet (memes, emoji), which at once seems commonplace and puerile. However, far from banal, our increasing entanglement with digital technologies is creating a new power of the image, running on a collective hysteria which stems from our experience of the Internet as a super-connected 'consensual hallucination' [Gibson: 1984]: an 'externalisation of our interior selves' [Coupland: 2013]. Using the Internet is an engagement of seemingly endless choice [Bridle: 2018], explained through the lens of the Neoliberal regime which operates through emotion, creating an inner need to surrender data [Han: 2017] and strengthened by understanding the hazards of our "new online collectivism" which includes a tension between individual and group identities [Lanier: 2014]. Our pursuit of 'curated novelty' [Gibson: 2017] moves from ideas of connoisseurship and taste, to concepts of fractal circulation, intensity and digital 'paganism' which has yet to be accounted for [Lyotard: 1985].
Research Aims:
- To re-conceptualise painting as a multidimensional agential matter by drawing on certain aspects of quantum physics: non-linear temporality, simultaneity, diffraction as well as fractal philosophy [Barad: 2007, Golding: 2010];
- To consider the potential of the illusionary in painting in relation to themes and concepts in art (flatness in Modernist painting; depth in Abstract Illusionism; trompe-l'oeil in Baroque; pastiche in Postmodernism; skeuomorphism in computer technologies);
- To reconsider the picture plane through its resonance with the screen/digital, for its contribution to a new kind of opticality in painting, tied to digital tactility and gesture [Bacon: 2016, Graw: 2018, Joselit: 2016];
- To work with digital toolkits (augmented / virtual reality, Adobe Photoshop, Painting apps) to assess their practical and theoretical potential in terms of sensuousness, space-time-mattering [Barad: 2007].
Significantly, this research will build on Abstract Illusionism, an American painting style in which abstract works were rendered with a sense of depth and shadow and defined by their "paradoxical" flatness and illusory non-flatness [Rose: 1967]. This reconciling of illusion with flatness arguably pre-empted the infinitely "deep", super-smooth surface of the digital screen: an understanding which has so far been neglected. This research complicates the binary of flat/not-flat through the addition of multiple planes (figurative, narrative, decorative, textural) and by locating and respecting the contemporary resurgence of trompe l'oeil and skeuomorphism, further deceiving the viewer about the nature of texture or space. In this way, painting is not just flat and not- flat but working in multiple, simultaneous dimensions that are both deceptive and imaginary. This new type of illusionism may well be the single common denominator linking the most advanced painting being done today.
Understanding the visual impact of the digital on painting also means engaging with the conversation of the Internet (memes, emoji), which at once seems commonplace and puerile. However, far from banal, our increasing entanglement with digital technologies is creating a new power of the image, running on a collective hysteria which stems from our experience of the Internet as a super-connected 'consensual hallucination' [Gibson: 1984]: an 'externalisation of our interior selves' [Coupland: 2013]. Using the Internet is an engagement of seemingly endless choice [Bridle: 2018], explained through the lens of the Neoliberal regime which operates through emotion, creating an inner need to surrender data [Han: 2017] and strengthened by understanding the hazards of our "new online collectivism" which includes a tension between individual and group identities [Lanier: 2014]. Our pursuit of 'curated novelty' [Gibson: 2017] moves from ideas of connoisseurship and taste, to concepts of fractal circulation, intensity and digital 'paganism' which has yet to be accounted for [Lyotard: 1985].
Research Aims:
- To re-conceptualise painting as a multidimensional agential matter by drawing on certain aspects of quantum physics: non-linear temporality, simultaneity, diffraction as well as fractal philosophy [Barad: 2007, Golding: 2010];
- To consider the potential of the illusionary in painting in relation to themes and concepts in art (flatness in Modernist painting; depth in Abstract Illusionism; trompe-l'oeil in Baroque; pastiche in Postmodernism; skeuomorphism in computer technologies);
- To reconsider the picture plane through its resonance with the screen/digital, for its contribution to a new kind of opticality in painting, tied to digital tactility and gesture [Bacon: 2016, Graw: 2018, Joselit: 2016];
- To work with digital toolkits (augmented / virtual reality, Adobe Photoshop, Painting apps) to assess their practical and theoretical potential in terms of sensuousness, space-time-mattering [Barad: 2007].
