Marcus Herse

I would be at great pains to say ‘where’ is the painting I am looking at. For I do not look at it as a thing; I do not fix it in its place. My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than I ‘see it’.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings

A painting is an object that is like you and me part of our world. Yet, art historically speaking until recently, we did not primarily perceive it as a thing, because painting’s intrinsic quality, the disruption and displacement of the spatial continuity of the world lies precisely in the fact that real space plays a subsidiary role. It is thought to refer to a world beyond our own. The countless comparisons of painting to the window, the portal and the many paintings that literally show windows and frames seemingly corroborate the view that an objectivized exterior is reported to the interior of our minds.

With the minimal and post-minimal experiments and their production of objects developed from the concerns of painting, real space was thematized in the context of pictorial thinking. The objects and their critical analysis tied in with the same view that sees the object of art as an exemplary representation of correspondences of form. Figure-ground relationship was transposed from the 2nd into the 3rd dimension and was now a conversation between physical objects and the gallery space, but it did not lead to a qualitative change in the discourse of the reality of painting. It was still seen externally, logically and scientifically.

More recently the influence of poststructuralist discourse emphasizes painting’s status as visual text. Visual idioms are reduced to the model of written discourse, and painting is proposed as a field that produces meaning to communicate ‘legible’ content. If we understand painting in this way we reduce it to a model based on conceptions of instrumental reason and marginalize the act of making in favor of the consumption of meaning.

Here the thinking of French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty presents a radically different view of the objecthood of painting: Rather than seeing the world as a compilation of things in space, which also contains our bodies and which can be ‘reported’ via painting, the emphasis is put on recognizing spaciality as part of our Being. We only ‘have’ space and the things in it because it is our condition as Beings to be physical, corpo-real, and not because we ‘understand’ space abstractly-scientifically from a speculatively proposed outside. Rather than seeking the view into an idealized world or reducing painting to an instrument of logical reason, a carrier of information that can be read, an emphasis is put on the mobility of the body, and how we access the world through it.

In a historically unprecedented moment in which a never-ending stream of digital quasi immaterial images zips through our minds it is this exhibition’s concern to recall that paintings, as the ancestors of these images are things that are made of the same stuff as we are and share our reality. The artists gathered in the exhibition may or may not see themselves first and foremost as painters; Their commonality is an interest in simultaneously rupturing and conciliating the spatial continuity of the art object in relation to our world.