How does painting resensitize the spectators
By Kecheng Zhu, 2019
I suggest that the meaning of a painting is invested by its materials and working process, they both are what we call painting methodology that many are pursuing to develop. This essay contextualizing my painting creation is an attempt to differentiate the function of painting from that of photography. paintings that refer to source images transmit message beyond the superficial. meanwhile, this mechanism also applies to sensitize the viewers who nowadays have been bombarded by the vast amounts of images and tired of distinguishing between information and manipulation, which attributes to the malpractice and misrepresentation of various mass media.
To be clear, the overall context is that people are living under the shade of post-truth and post-digital, which is an epidemic phenomenon that has heavily affected the ideology of society in which appeals to emotion and personal belief are more influential than objective facts in shaping public opinion.
Many contemporary artists are leading people to question the content of information and means of representation by employing different art techniques. Painting as a traditionally visual form seems to have its own limits in many aspects but actually a successful medium. However, the point is that, when facing the pressure of information crisis, painting is also able to make information interrogate and to rethink society in cultural, historical, and more importantly, aesthetic terms, rather than generating the reproduction of the substance of things. At the same time, painting is capable of constructing a self-reflective medium, which ‘coaches’ its viewers to ask relevant questions by themselves.
Working on mass cultural images
My work is mainly based on photographs from different channels. The process to collect images is a way to understand a whole situation through its fragments, Actually, the first-hand images we get on television, newspapers and the internet are the result of a geographical and social fragmentation of the production (Alfredo Cramerotti, 2009, P57)Any image in the context of such an information age is the product of this whole society. Its existence is built on a vast network of connections that links each role in one event, such as the victim, documenter, communicator, and witness, then finally reaches the public. Each character has an indelible influence on the meaning of the image and has changed the value of this image. Which means that a single image does not stand as an isolated episode, but rather reflects ‘the values of its context’ (Alfredo Cramerotti, 2009, P58)
When these images are the views of the world, artists can feed themselves by absorbing the nutrition of information. Then to provides a “view on the view,” using his or her own methodology, a way to question our assumptions about how we perceive the world.at the same time, to create something that can allow people to go beyond the superficial engagement of mass cultural images.
Mother and child 2013
Here, If we look at Mother and child by Uwe Witter, his work reflects on the nature and meaning of images. His source material is carefully chosen from digital representations, researched in the depths of the internet.just like jumping memories. He keeps track of the trajectory of each image for a long time, presenting the emotion behind the image, including violence, loss, or happiness. Throughout his work, Wittwer is concerned with authenticity and truth, multiple refractions of reality, and the role of the artist as image hunter and voyeur (Parafin Ltd, 2016)
Mass cultural images is to say that people have been feeding too much that is taken by the widespread possession of cheap digital recording equipment, they are, as we mentioned above, the social fragments, This would mean that professional journalists do not make the major part of the production of information, even if the most visited online news channels belong to established press and broadcasters. the amateur reporter happens to be on the spot. therefore, most of those reportage photographs are supposed not to evoke but to show, which can count as evidence, but not the mirror of the reality. So how to modify them based on our own understanding becomes quite significant for Artists to be aware when collecting source from such images bank. Especially for artists adopting painting techniques. the truth is that we are confronted with a continuum of representations stretched taut between the abstract concepts of photography and painting, each of which by asserting its own conventional reality implicitly questions the conventions and the truth of the other (Robert Storr 2011, P244)
Even for some professional and well-developed images exhibited in authoritarian platforms as artwork or published in news, reconstructions and changes are still unnecessary, however, what I suggest is that painting to some extends, is able to do better in demonstrating the same subject, Here I would like to exemplify the photography works by Don Mccullin.
by which, we can see that photographs do have the power to hold attention for its unease object, In his photographs we can see death, starved children, and much more other sorts of devastating scene, However, photography does not allow us to spend more time on contemplating subject issues, it is totally full, and has no space to contemplate. Actually there needs to be an experiential space that photography reduce to zero, a space that is defined not by our identification with the subject but by our difference and distances to the characters which we can ponder, painting, on the other hand, could open up this space by working differently in its various types of painterly issues and materials, reconstructing and rehearsing on the figures, color and layers. This experiential space also creates a sense of silence, a kind of silence we can add our own tones in.“ pictures, if they are to have effect, must have the tremendous intensity of silence, a filled silence or void, The observer should become motionless before the picture, freeze, A kind of picture terror…the silence before the storm, it is not about developing feelings of melancholy, but about a certain form of déjà vu” (Helen M 2009, P172) What we require is silence, but what silence requires is people to go on talking.
In the Chinese artist Peiming Yan’s watercolor work Sudanese Child (2006), the source image is one of a series of children’s portraits in the Deutsche Bank Collectionthatwe’ve seen countless times on TV or in the newspapers. We know it all too well from news coverage of war and humanitarian catastrophe: a starving child from a Third-World country staring at us from vacant eyes. It is an image that has almost become a stereotype and lost its provocative power. It is really a sorrow to acknowledge that most of the photographs from the press, social media and individuals are gradually deprived of the function to stimulate imagination and emotion as there is too much horror being watched every day, such horror scene or images of terrorism have both a commodity value within news media and a symbolic value within political discourse.
Sudanese Child 2006
Battles and massacres documented as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. (Susan Sontag 1977, P30). Photo is a critical medium that people usually receive, although sometimes its reportages are able to traumatize, but rarely ‘move’ the viewer, which means it hardly functions as reference for in-depth discussion or consequential actions that are fundamentally important in the process of creating empathy. inSudanese Child Yan Pei-Ming succeeds in giving the image back its urgency through a form of painting that is as analytical as it is powerful in expression – the penetrating gaze. This is a kind of expression that allows us to talk about this mean of representation together with questioning the content it brings. questioning the content means the exploration of realness, to find out what has actually happened or is happening.
Revisiting, Reconstructing and Reinterpreting (iconic and genre images)
The first-hand reportage and visual representation are often provided by the others, resulting in a distance between the event and most of the masses. and our situation is altogether different. However, the ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image—of an agony, of ruin—is an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of the world, which means there is always a collective connection or similarity in everybody’s experience, that sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling.
For many well-known figures and affairs, painting is serving as access for people to revisit them and to register effects. for example, by producing political or religious photo-based paintings, it is not about telling the existing truth, it is more about representing something that perhaps viewers are familiar with a second time, but in the next moment, introduce them a sense of strangeness and a narrative different from what they are used to. By which, not only the artist but also audiences can participate in the cooperation to reinterpret and revisit images that are quite symbolic.Thus, to look how artists shifted the perception of some well-known images by modifying it or, painting it, we may not skip The Germany artist Gerhard Richter, who has worked in his own mean to inquiry stories and facts that were over-produced and over-consumed.
September
In his source materials, there is one photograph that was collected from the newspapers, but in contrast to the media representation, Richter abstracted his work by blurring its surface with a squeegee. Exposing the canvas underneath which muddies the color which was clear blue between the two buildings, to become a dirty blue, in turn, the gray has made the building itself slightly tend to blue. Meanwhile, The oranges that were in explosion by the picture again, are brought way down by the scraping to the blue complements. when rendering them together, their overlap goes to a great brown. bringing the whole image down to a sort of low visual, lens quality, to undo the symbolic force to a certain degree.The colors, already subdued, become muted, while the original reference points- burning towers about to collapse become almost unrecognizable (technically, we can call this as a manner of erasure that makes certain elements vanish. It is also adopted by certain artists, whom, I will talk about later in the next chapters) I think this visual between abstraction and the subdued figure of its reference points add to the sense that this apparently unremarkable painting is defying and therefore questioning the spectacle of the events on which it is based and its relentless reproduction by media.
It is useful to return to artist Yan Pei-Ming’s works, which produced partly based on his memory of public spaces dominated by those historical figures. Thus, the use of their iconic images has released his intimate and personal memory and imagination. He was not the only one to go through this complex experience, of course; an entire generation that has experienced and survived the dramatic changes of global geopolitics. Ming’s painting is capable of revoking empathy within audiences according to their personal memory and experience of the world.
Red Pope 2005
His canvases are typically mono- or bi-chromatic and painted with large brushes (sometimes a broom). With a mastered economy of marks, he delineates his compositions with broad, sweeping gestures and visible drips, resulting in images that dissolve into near-abstraction at close view. Red Pope 2005 is a vivid result of the passionate, dynamic, and powerful gestures with which he "attacks" the canvas to introduce a sense of aggressive beauty. Also, by virtue of these aggressive brush marks and the intensity, brought about by the bright red background and white garment, the character seems to develop itself as powerful as the painting language that dominates the subject matter. Thereby, Yan is successful in adopting these paints properties as a realm to bring up the intense but vague presence to images of pope and other celebrities, including Mao Zedong Barack Obama etc. that are reproduced thousands of times in the media and history. Nevertheless, his methodology, especially the use of color is by no means simply expressionistic, extravagant, and self-indulgent manifestations. Instead, it is always highly "economical" and efficient—black and white, occasionally red and grey are the only colors that he applies in introducing a universe beyond the "reality" of the real color.
Red Pope is a typical one in the oeuvres of his celebrity paintings, echoing to Portrait of Innocent X by Velazquez, in which, the portrait depicted is far from any kind of celebration or worship to the subjects’ personality. Either far from an attractive man; in fact, his face was described as "satirical, saturnine, coarse, and hideous," reflective of the Pope's "contumacious spirit. " Which to the viewers is provocative, critical, and even subversive. Velazquez submerged his composition in various tones of red, allowing the Pope's traditional costume to dominate the scene. Beyond emphasizing the identity and status of the Pope, however, this tonal choice infuses the painting with an atmosphere of oppressive power and potential danger.
innocent x
Above all, the figures of Pope produced by both Yan and Velazquez at different time periods in history, are a force in order to mobilize public opinion and social awareness. “This provocation not only subverts the convention of artistic representation; more importantly, it challenges the common sense of values in public language.” (Deutsche Bank AG, 2012)
Revisiting something iconic and representative is to pick those images again, what do we think those people now, by looking images once more, it asks audiences to think about the political complicity and humanitarian crisis. In this image, pope Francis is about to keen down and kiss the feet of South Sudan’s previously warring leaders.
The story behind and context of this depiction should teach us that hundreds of thousands of citizens died in the civil war caused by the clash of political power and parties. It is pope who performed this rare gesture, appealing to the two military forces to stay in peace on behalf of the victims. This photo has actually heavily moved many people after being published through the broadcast. however photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace, cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. Is the pope’s visit a performance or a real strategy? for me, this image serves as a signal to the fragile and brief peace, and the much more complicated contradiction and backlash are coming up to break it.
The lack of Transparency is everywhere, Frankly, this image is too fit
into the public acceptance. Reality is usually made in Coherence that is produced when facts are inserted into a narrative that has a structure that is familiar to the viewer. Which means People like to see and accept what they are used to, when facts are embedded in a coherent narration that appears to be real and authentic, they become plausible and convincing. (Alfredo Cramerotti, P70) The impact of reportage needs to be developed, and an artwork should supplement for the inadequacy of the media imagery.
The Series of white, Brother 2019
When it comes to painting, obviously the original content has been transformed into something new. with the investment of painterly issues, the aim is to encourage the audience to complete the thinking within sufficient time, after the details and processing on the canvas lead them to observe more deeply. my painting The Series of white, Brother presents an image that the view of pope’s back is recognizable yet slightly sinister, rendered in a palette that is muted and reduced. at the same time, the confrontation between paints and the idea of recognition never lets people forget that they are looking at a painting on canvas.
It is to say that deep observation and re-observing are quite significant for painting to achieve a better consequence than the media records do. In painting, there is one dominant sign, the indexical signs, or indexicality created by painterly issues, indexical signs present the physical power. In painting the physical form of its signs seem to get constantly emphasized, the attention of spectator is drawn in the physicality of these signs, this happens regardless of how they refer to something whether something symbolic or iconic.
Indexicality also allows painting to establish a physical connection, that is to the maker not the objects, Which means that the signs of indexicality are able to suggest the imaginary presence of the absent artist, since painting is a highly differentiated language that consists of a number of methods that allow for the fabrication of the fantasy of the artists presence as an effect. By virtue of this effect and methodology, consuming painting has become an action that is capable ofintegrating the thinking of consumers and put them on the table where they are affected by the combination of objects power, artists personal and the conversation between hand-made quality and viewers, allowing them to draw and connect more imagination and understandings.
Moreover. When asked in our interview that “Do you think the painting as a very traditional mean, to what extents, is able to self-reflect and resensitize people?” The art writer and curator Alfredo Cramerotti responded that “I believe painting is a very complex and multilayered form of expression; it’s not only about color and canvas, it is about time, the principle of the ‘unfinished’ and the fact that for its very materiality and versatility. it presents a level of accessibility that other forms may lack. For this point, we can think of film as an instance; which is highly distributed and accessible, but once seen rarely re-watched.” (interview with Alfredo Cramerotti).
In another word. Painting importantly reveals the possibility of repeated viewings, since reality is not a language in itself but the condition for a language (Bruno 2006: 112) It takes time to decide how to (and if to) relate to all aspects of a situation and the people and stories told in the work. It is a matter of adding knowledge, linking what we already know with what we do not know and putting the new in sequence with other knowledge. Regarding visual communication: the first, ‘the more we know the more we see’ implies that we can multiply the meanings we can make from our visual impressions. The second, ‘what is not seen is as important as what is seen’, proposes that we should always ask what television, magazines and newspapers are not showing us ‘we do not know what we are seeing until we have learned what it is we are seeing’ (Natharius 2004 p242)
What we should know 2019
What should we know is a painting that draws upon disparate source images, ranging from documentary films to the my own photographs, its multi-images content and form incorporate a range of stylistic modes and genres, which are from the formal portrait to the casual snapshot, however, slightly different to previous, for this one I have experimented using film techniques, such as cropping, close-ups, framing, and sequencing, which offer fresh perspectives on the medium of painting.
here are images that zoom in the subject,cropping technique allows spectators to have no empty space to see the subject in other ways around, so as to generate an integrated view. on the other hand, there are also some images working from distance. which is quite important in filling out part of the meaning of this painting – witnessing.
As we move from one image to the next when these imageries are conjoined, meaning is cultivated to a great extend, and shifted from one to the next, these subjects, no matter iconic or banal, through the equal treatment of painting property, they are all fragments of history, presented in the language of clouded memories.
Additionally, What I want from this painting is to require people to Interweave their individual knowledge and experience that, When confronting with these static images with painterly issues, the viewer would grasp a fragment of things and from there builds upon this, engaging their own perception, producing little actions, being aware of the impulses that provoke them; not imposed from the outside, but generated from within.
Again, What we see bases on what we have already known, our perception of objects deeply connected with our experience, in what should we know, some figures appear to be ordinary at the first glance, however, by virtue of their stylistic forms, it might arouse some deep recollection to the historical depiction. For example, the second image on the third row, a mother hugging her child, their sentimental emotion has been shown through the exposure of light, which expressively is able to reminiscent viewers of the figures of Virgin and Jesus, or the picture of a refugee family that suffers from separation and immigration. An image can be understood in multiple ways due to the different context, culture and time as Luc Tuymans once articulated his portraiture paintings in his book as means of examining the nature of memory and representation.
The nose 2002
the most representative one is The nose 2002, whose subject is a recognizable figure, but is taken from an image that Tuymans altered slightly, shifting from a smile to an unreadable facial expression, the facial structure of this figure is one that circulates in a particular way within a history of western representation. Tuymans himself has called it almost Christlike, as it stylistically references ecce homo paintings designed to emphasize Jesus’ humanity and suffering, made in 2002, however the face may also be read as Middle Eastern in the artist’s view, a particular physiognomic type that registers very differently at a moment of such extraordinary struggles both within the Middle East and between the Middle East and the West. (Helen. M 2009 P176)
Stimulating through history and contemporary
Painting resensitizing public can be seen in many works that reuse historical figures and elements, reflecting to the contemporary cases and situation. History is, of course, of crucial importance to our understanding of what we were, what we are and what we can be. (Tom. D. F 2015)
it could be anywhere 2008
Our contemporary experience of history through the widespread availability of information that has made this a time when we are re-evaluating moments of historical importance to contemplate the present.
The painting it could be anywhere by Adrian Ghenie demonstrates in a way of distance view. viewers are an observer and can’t intervene what is taking place in a quiet dark night, looking down through a hole at this advantage position which is not like the angle of CCTV, but a higher place. it raises questions to audiences that “where am I, where is my position to this?” there is a sense of silence, we all know that paints do not talk, but, here we can imagine a gun shoot, just one single gun shoot, not sense of somebody’s screaming, shouting, or violence in this black- whiteness, and chiaroscuro. Moreover, the sort of dark and slightly abstract vegetation on the right seems to serve as a veil or curtain, covering part of the deadly scene as well as history. What is also astonishing to people in this painting is its title, we should know that a supplemental title is quite significant for a work and an exhibition to provoke, it opens up the possibilities for a sub-image that is even not painted.(Qatar Museums 2015) For the title of this painting, its cognitive association and implication to many contemporarily unspeakable and immoral events help revoke the collective resonance, which meansfrom images we do not where it is, no location is specified, it could be anywhere!
The Trial
To resensitize is to remind people who had once had empathy and been sensitive of that they have literally become careless as too much images and information circulated through the mass communication are losing their significance and power to provoke, the key to bridge the gap is trying a new strategy of representation, which brings about perspectives, connects experience and memory, and introduces narratives by the commitment to investigate the possibilities of painting.
The Trial produced by Adrian Ghenie is to present the last moment of Romanian dictator and his wife before their execution. The faces are blurred, as if their very identity is being disrupted, annihilated in the process of painting. The manner in which artist uses photographic sources and then paints images which blur, scrap and obfuscate these sources has resulted in the clear comparison to another photographic image-based painters Francis Bacon, whose erasure technique is to leave out and strip down all but the most essential. “the more artificial painting is the more reality it contains. Bacon wants his work to look like real, or perhaps in his opinion the artificial is real, just like the reality has been fabricated” (Richard, P.73)
As a result of erasure, not only the defaced people, but we can also see the ambiguous scene of the room that has lost most of its details, they are all there to reveal the feebleness and inconsistency of our memory. As Luc Tuymans once stated that “Memory is an interesting thing that makes inconsistency, we would not need so many visual elements if we can remember everything consistently.” The Trialis a contemporary History Painting, using the model and format of History Painting, but to deal with events from recent Romanian History. the artist provides us with a vision of a specific moment but through a lens that appreciates the impact of time, the bias of the narratives that reach us and the uncertainty of our vision (Tom.D.F,2004)
Using historical relevance to reveal the turbulence of the present is also the core value of the work by artist - Luc Tuymans. Whose subject is history, then the object is a vessel of historically collective memory. Many of his work refer to his own visual memory of people in photograph rather than from the photograph itself.(MoMA, 2004)In the 2001 Venice Biennale, Tuymans exhibited a series of history paintings to emphasize the repressed aspects of Belgium’s history that had resurfaced through current political and cultural events. He depicts Lumumba who was murdered as the first prime minister of Congo after speaking against the brutal historical realities of Belgian rule. This portrait is made in a
detailed and sensitive manner, with a distance gaze, that watching at something far away, rather than the audiences, and obstructs any sense of psychological interiority. and his skin tone has been lightened and rendered through a roughly blended patch of paints applied with short, hesitant strokes, giving the image unresolved and slightly anxious air.
Lumumba
Mwana Kitoko
In the same time, there is another figure pronounced by a different painterly tone, Tuymans based this painting on an image from a documentary film he watched in his childhood, the Belgian colonial authorities. A deep impression of this man is engraved by the conflation of whiteness with colonial power that is suggested by the king’s military uniform. However, there is not too much details in his facial presentation, merely the hint of a nose and dark sunglasses obscuring his eyes, this small patches of skin on the face and hands are painted in bruiselike shades of pink and yellow that are echoed in the body of the plane, gradually fusing the man to be a political machine. The visual opposition of the images of Lumumba and Mwana echoes the polarized political roles that the two men played in the history (Helen. M 2009 P158)a turbulent history that needs to be put forward.
This exhibition is a clear indication that his paintings evoke deeply troubled histories, underscoring the influence that historical events continuously influence in the present. Nowadays, when we consider the present events, you will find that this sort of situation -historically devastate, evil, unspeakable human transactions and political tragedies are still occurring in present and will never end. Furthermore, now it is “a time when we are re-evaluating moments of historical importance, and reconsider the present events through, for example, websites or the media — often involves bits and pieces of the historical record presented out of context, meaning that historical narratives are always constructed from contingent uncertain and disputable fragments, thus they are unreliable, “this idea of distrusting imagery, even my own, was there from the very, very start. What is happening now [in the era of fake news] just proves me right.” (Cristina, R. 2019) Tuymans says, speaking at his exhibition opening on 22 March 2019.
As painter, when dealing with these pieces and fragments of history, like the genre or historical images captured from photographs and videos, we should take them a step away from realism by analyzing the imagery, sketching it and painting it countless times in order to provide numerous dimensions and narratives to the final piece in oil paint, compelling viewers to challenge their own recollection of past events.
In conclusion, painting provides us with more accesses to the critical reflection, by the ingredients of paints and subject and referents constitute a moment of articulated aesthetic experience that opens our sensibility and serves as an occasion for something else to happen.
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