Paint: It is pre-occupation with space

Abstract

Painting and space are two terms often spoken of concurrently in the critique of painting. Some of the ways that painting has investigated space on and off the picture plane is by developing a pictorial language that manipulates surface, form and matter. Over time investigations into what painting can be has developed a visual language that is able to dip in and out of paintings tradition while persistent investigations into space within painting has allowed individual practice to branch into three-dimensions and perhaps further. This enquiry begins with the Pre-Renaissance. This is an era within painting’s history that is heavily laden with Religious iconography and the beginnings of Western Perspectival painting. Yet some of the paintings of this era are still able to engage a viewer physically, mentally and emotionally even now, centuries later. Lucio Fontana’s claim that a spatial artwork is not reliant on form uncovers the notion that a spatial artwork should move freely through time and space. A focus on painting in its expanded field reveals how the manipulation of painting’s spatial constructs is instrumental in the pursuit of a “truly spatial” artwork. Painting’s expansion may have broadened its material and aesthetic possibilities, but at its core, painting has worked within its foundation as a practice that works with the tension between spatial reality and spatial illusion. Exploring this tension reveals how working within a system of contradictions can open a dialogue with the body that elicits affect and an artwork’s spatial possibilities. The accompanying creative work to this enquiry engages with the notion that painting inherently engages with space. By working within a dialogue of pictorial and material tensions.