metaxia

The Empathy of Line in the Artistic Process: From the origin in burlap to inkjet printings.

Empathy: a. The power of understanding and imaginatively entering into another person’s feelings, b. The attribution to an object, such as a work of art, of one’s own emotional or intellectual feeling about it.

(Collins English Dictionary).

My recent work is based on the idea of digital canvas. The infinite repetition of vertical and horizontal lines may look simple but it represents a whole world of emotions which are part of the development of processes in art, in particular the development from a burlap canvas to inkjet printings. The infinite canvas transmits the sense of time passing, explores another person’s feelings and enables the viewer to construct the final image in their mind. It is also an artistic object created by personal effort, through digital technology. While creating and exploring similar but not identical structures, I use Photoshop tools, on digitized old photographs or digital snapshots and produce inkjet printings. Although Photoshop may not seem like an artistic process, artistic abilities such as drawing and painting are always present in the whole procedure and they become part of it. I feel free to intervene and I try to make a shift by changing generally accepted codes and standard procedures. The immediacy of photography is a contemporary way of practice and transmits the sense of the temporary impression of reality.

In other words, I produce an image of a modified structure of an object, like the burlap or the canvas, which in this case is primarily one of the basic materials of traditional painting. While it is in my intention to “play” with structures, I do not like to abandon painting as a value. In fact, I consider that the painting process is still a valuable and unique “tool” to transfer ideas and emotions even though we live in the era in which there is a plethora of powerful images transmitted through the digital media: Internet and television. However those who criticize digital art or digital photography for not being art fail to appreciate the fact that digital media are just a contemporary way to present the technology of our present era. Every historical period has its own technology, for instance, in the past, the technology was mechanical and not digital like nowadays.

I see the digital canvas as a metaphore for a meeting point between visual arts and poetry. Poetry’s medium is language and it uses it on order to create poems which are unique structures full of emotions and full of imaginary pictures of a whole parallel world. In the same way, a digital canvas allows me to create an imaginary picture printed on paper. This picture is the result of exploring and using the “grid” structure of a common canvas. As far as I am concerned, I “play” with common logical structures such as the grid, using the power of imagination which poetry has as is its basic element. There is poetry (in the sense of “poisis”: Greek word which means: I do) in the basis of creation and this is an unquestionable fact.

Poetry differs from logic most remarkably in that poetry implies a mind free to imagine and create while logic has a syntax which is not always able to render the shades of emotions necessary to a contemplative mind. Poetry has no rules of a specific procedure. Rules belong to the technical, logical mind and not to the contemplative mind. Moreover, rules can be applied from external factors while poetry must have its rhythm of growing from within to determine itself. I think that this is the core of my work as a practitioner: I want to apply the poetic creative procedures over the stable logical grid structure. Consequently, the result is quite remarkable: “The Poetry of the Real”. The “Poetry of the Real” is not an imaginary goal since it has become apparent in front of our eyes in the form of a printed image or an artistic construction.