Long Day (2023)
written on the occasion of a solo exhibition at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA
![View of an outdoor sculpture on the façade of a building. An elongated figure in metal stands, leans against the wall, and holds a bag.]()
My figurative paintings and sculptures are open to and invested in reality: what reality is; and the way in which we ought to be in reality. “Ought to be,” I say because of the hope that my work be a pedagogical experience – similarly in the way Cézanne said, “a painting is an education” – that, in the case of my work, leads to a shift in the way we each see and be responsible to the world and to one another in the world. I hope.
So what is reality? Is it the body and the world as they actually exist and we know? Think semiotics or the language-game (Wittgenstein): reality is then the world we know only as much as we have the language for. Or is it the body and the world as they really, essentially are and we sense as opposed to knowing? Reality is then the world which we do not and cannot ever know, for senses are always subjected to doubt. Here is what my images and materials have taught me so far in the studio: yes and yes, reality is a very strange world which is the known and at the same time the unknowable. Another way of saying this would be: reality is a membrane which has the known on one side and the unknowable on the other side and makes them correspond. (This approach to reality is inspired by Deleuze who calls memory a membrane which has “sheets of past” on one side and “layers of reality” on the other.) The thinner the membrane is, the stronger sensation of a feeling of reality we experience. In other words, to make the membrane the thinnest as possible within our capacity would be what it means to realize. And to realize requires an education of language – visual language in my case – and an education of senses. I also want to emphasize my interest in the membrane which is thin rather than porous because the image of the membrane which is kept intact promises the eternal existence of reality; and to me reality is what often feels like home…. How paradoxical is this.
How I have come to know that bit about reality is quite simple. For many of my works, I would first set out to create an image of the unknowable; but then the known would secretly make its way and lurk. The figure ends up looking like someone I have met, or at least a part of the mise-en-scène ends up looking like someplace I have been – if not so much literally, in the ways they share the same qualities and resonate to the known. Then occasionally I desire to go beyond my habit of chasing the unknowable and set out to portray and depict the known, e.g., myself, my family and friends, and plein air; but then the unknowable would somehow seep through from the way I paint and sculpt. Intuitive alternation would be made between vertical mark making and horizontal laying down of the paint; between matte and glossy; between the pursuit of light and the pursuit of the dark; and between thin and thick layers of paint. I also arrive at different parts of the canvas at different times and alternate between painting wet-on-wet and painting wet-on-dry. Similarly, my sculptures each embody the material alternation and time differences. Qualities of the unknowable which are once unthinkable for the known emerge; and regardless of from which end of the dialectic of the known and the unknowable I begin, reality which is both the known and the unknowable presents itself as the nonlinear, the mysterious, the strange, the foreign, the clandestine, and the opaque and luminous at the same time….
The figures in my images exist and flicker in gentleness which “doesn’t speak well,” “lets itself be forgotten,” and is at the same time “as discreet and essential as a heartbeat” (Dufourmantelle). A way for the figures – and for us – to be together in this strange world would be to recognize that they each have their own relationship to reality, or have their own reality, which, even to them, is strange; and to let one another be quiet, vulnerable, discreet, and essential – and simply be.
In reality, the figures in my images: we have met them; and we have not. If reality in my work feels like a long day with a bit of melancholia, a bit of the pathetic, and a bit of the boring, the reason might be that the existence of the figure is forever delayed, forever missing, and, strangely, forever contemporary.
written on the occasion of a solo exhibition at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA
My figurative paintings and sculptures are open to and invested in reality: what reality is; and the way in which we ought to be in reality. “Ought to be,” I say because of the hope that my work be a pedagogical experience – similarly in the way Cézanne said, “a painting is an education” – that, in the case of my work, leads to a shift in the way we each see and be responsible to the world and to one another in the world. I hope.
So what is reality? Is it the body and the world as they actually exist and we know? Think semiotics or the language-game (Wittgenstein): reality is then the world we know only as much as we have the language for. Or is it the body and the world as they really, essentially are and we sense as opposed to knowing? Reality is then the world which we do not and cannot ever know, for senses are always subjected to doubt. Here is what my images and materials have taught me so far in the studio: yes and yes, reality is a very strange world which is the known and at the same time the unknowable. Another way of saying this would be: reality is a membrane which has the known on one side and the unknowable on the other side and makes them correspond. (This approach to reality is inspired by Deleuze who calls memory a membrane which has “sheets of past” on one side and “layers of reality” on the other.) The thinner the membrane is, the stronger sensation of a feeling of reality we experience. In other words, to make the membrane the thinnest as possible within our capacity would be what it means to realize. And to realize requires an education of language – visual language in my case – and an education of senses. I also want to emphasize my interest in the membrane which is thin rather than porous because the image of the membrane which is kept intact promises the eternal existence of reality; and to me reality is what often feels like home…. How paradoxical is this.
How I have come to know that bit about reality is quite simple. For many of my works, I would first set out to create an image of the unknowable; but then the known would secretly make its way and lurk. The figure ends up looking like someone I have met, or at least a part of the mise-en-scène ends up looking like someplace I have been – if not so much literally, in the ways they share the same qualities and resonate to the known. Then occasionally I desire to go beyond my habit of chasing the unknowable and set out to portray and depict the known, e.g., myself, my family and friends, and plein air; but then the unknowable would somehow seep through from the way I paint and sculpt. Intuitive alternation would be made between vertical mark making and horizontal laying down of the paint; between matte and glossy; between the pursuit of light and the pursuit of the dark; and between thin and thick layers of paint. I also arrive at different parts of the canvas at different times and alternate between painting wet-on-wet and painting wet-on-dry. Similarly, my sculptures each embody the material alternation and time differences. Qualities of the unknowable which are once unthinkable for the known emerge; and regardless of from which end of the dialectic of the known and the unknowable I begin, reality which is both the known and the unknowable presents itself as the nonlinear, the mysterious, the strange, the foreign, the clandestine, and the opaque and luminous at the same time….
The figures in my images exist and flicker in gentleness which “doesn’t speak well,” “lets itself be forgotten,” and is at the same time “as discreet and essential as a heartbeat” (Dufourmantelle). A way for the figures – and for us – to be together in this strange world would be to recognize that they each have their own relationship to reality, or have their own reality, which, even to them, is strange; and to let one another be quiet, vulnerable, discreet, and essential – and simply be.
In reality, the figures in my images: we have met them; and we have not. If reality in my work feels like a long day with a bit of melancholia, a bit of the pathetic, and a bit of the boring, the reason might be that the existence of the figure is forever delayed, forever missing, and, strangely, forever contemporary.
It’s a long day since seeing the image of you and until finally meeting you. Will we ever meet?