Implosion / Explosion

In a world that seeks, day after day, to suppress the very possibility of transgression through the mechanical reproduction of transgressive images—in other words, a world that attempts to seal the eyelids shut with a powerful adhesive—the act of seeing the micro-explosions taking place all around us makes possible a form of dreaming while awake. From within a surveilled mind, mediated through the remaining senses, the possibility of an outward manifestation of action gradually emerges. If we can endure the experience of witnessing a nightmare while awake, then the possibility of painting what is seen becomes available.

This time, rather than drawing simple forms and reconciling them with visual lines, we follow a line of narrative and color from within, until this very condition is transformed into a visual “nature” of its own. It must come to stand with such autonomy that it no longer appears as something crafted by the painter’s hand, but rather as an independent stranger, standing on its own.

Yet in order for this to happen, one must first endure the pressure of rule-making and pass beyond it. The painterly abstraction that constitutes the overall body of these paintings is an action moving from within toward the outside, an encounter with an exterior that is transgressive and alien. With the help of the hand, the eye frees itself from rules, extends itself, and suddenly, upon the surface of the canvas, an autonomous other emerges—an other that, in turn, exerts pressure upon the hand and the eye.

This interference, this perpetual struggle with predetermined ideas and with a structural resistance that follows an uncontrollable logic, produces moments of visual implosion and explosion. Within the eye, as upon the surface of the canvas, the pressure of layers and plateaus reaches folds that preserve the perpetual turbulence of formlessness. The folds slide over one another, and an implosion occurs. The image recognizes itself in relation to the eye, and the eye recognizes itself in relation to the image. For a few moments, the universal law of vision is suspended.

Here, we encounter unruly roots and mountains roaring without reason. The painter’s hand transgresses the limits of the mind, while the restlessness of the canvas asserts its own pressure. Suddenly, at a point where we do not expect it, these two forces create a fissure, within which something appears to be struggling to be born, to explode outward, or to emerge through an act of resistance. Only afterward does it become apparent that the form left behind by this struggle resembles either a mountain or a root.

Yet these mountains and roots do not represent any code or sign. Here, a nature beyond visibility carries out the process of its own formation through the agency of the painter’s hand and eye. What emerges is neither an image of nature nor a representation of a natural form, but rather the appearance of a nature that takes shape through a process of implosion and explosion.

At this point, it becomes possible to give this act/performance an abstract order: to show how each stage may become a possibility for the stage that follows, though never completely and never as an identical continuation. The paintings are arranged from abstraction toward reference only in order to evoke the possibility of uncertain lines becoming forms. Yet an unbridgeable gap remains between each work.

No work is the “inevitable continuation” of the next. Each work instead represents only one possibility among many. The movement from implosion to explosion, and from abstraction toward reference, therefore does not constitute a linear progression, but a series of ruptures, displacements, and possible formations.