Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes about painting as a practice that negotiates the material and the visua
Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes about painting as a practice that negotiates the material and the visual. For him, the body of the painter at work demonstrates the embodied nature of all viewership; the act transcends the simple transcription of reality by acknowledging that such a thing is in fact impossible—all seeing is contingent and situated, further mediated by its material representation. Painting lays bare these processes of negotiation, manifesting irresolution, compromise, and investigation on the canvas. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s gorgeous paintings push this line of thinking to its logical extreme, in that her portraits do not even pretend to depict objective reality in a subjective manner, which has arguably been one of the projects of figurative painting since the birth of the modern. Instead, she paints figures who are purely imagined. This centers painting as an act not of depiction but of creation; it acknowledges the inseparability of representation—and art as one of its primary vehicles—from reality. Rather than a description of material conditions of the world, then, I like to think that Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings literally create new worlds or new ways of being in this one, by giving them material form.Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Willow Strip, 2017 -- source link
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