Mid point review

Comments /notes

Brave to destroy work.

Looks like destroying, but some beauty. Lovely layers and brush strokes.

Not destroying, aestheticising. Spray painted image more dramatic. Resonances with graffiti and vandalism. Left painting seems affected.

Questioning the idea of painting as self-portrait. Conveys sense of the artist in the conventions of representations of artists.

Unknown Kettle’s Yard exhibition where an artist destroyed self-portrait using a blue square. Aware it is a portrait of Max in both images.

Pasolini film (Theorem) depicts an artist’s movement through the rhetoric of painting. Sequence in film about object, gesture, movement. Work feels rhetorical.

Canvases warped. Part of the aesthetic? Alter pieces?

Greyscale and relationship to photography. A dialogue. Passport photo, identity, identity theft.

Scale odd. Political portraits. Dictators. Maybe relates more to ways of destroying photos. Paintings difficult to destroy. Image destroyed, not the painting.

Spray paint over face – censorship.

The relationship between the two paintings allow you access to what has been erased by the spray paint.

Beginning of a series? Negotiating destruction.

Scale cold be larger e.g. graffiti murals. If enormous, deconstructs the self.

Evokes feeling of punching your reflection in a mirror after a bad day.

Read in relation to the capitalist realists, e.g. Richter, Frize.

Parody of anti-concept in painting?

Where does the work go next? How valid is the self-portrait in contemporary society? What space does it create for the viewer? Does the work have a romantic character?

Interesting to see the canvas destroyed. Addition of lots of layers, like layers of graffiti.

Want to see the process in relation to the work, e.g. the grid.

Playful element of sprayed face on plinth. Maintaining a lightness would be wonderful.

Gesture of erasure seems reluctant (spray paint). Tentative.

Third painting could be destroyed absolutely and set up a different relationship between the first two. Process of erasure could be documented (video).

Destruction can be cathartic. No sense of release in the work.

What is the next stage? Could have pedagogical or interventionalist aspect. Joseph Beuys. History of art being defaced and destroyed, e.g. the suffragettes.

Painting a very genuine process. Could raise questions of what’s real, i.e. has the erased portion actually been painted? Example of a unknown piece in the Istanbul Biennale. Three dimensional faxing of the David.

Could use different blacks to improve.

Next steps? Erasure painting into a corner.

Defacing photos in newspapers. Walter Benjamin.

Lots of ways forward. Could be menacing – Talking head, the broken digital image.

Longing for colour. Greyscale easier? Greyscale produces a different temporal relationship.

My Comment to the comments:

I liked the discussion, if it is actually an destructive, or an aestheticising act, because it is what I wanted to arise. I also liked the connection made to identity, and passport photos, as it goes above the fact, that it is just a self portrait, as it contains something else. I´m still not sure about the question, if the "destruction should be documented or not, as a video would add another form of aesthetics, and visual impressions, that I´m actually not interested in. Documentation would be a work of its own, not really connected to the painting. I got really interested in the question if the erased part of the painting really got erased, or not. So it arised the idea to make -fake- destroyed self portraits, with parts, that seem to be destroyed, but actually never have been painted. Also the connection with censorship gets another face, as only a blank part of the canvas is censored. I would stick to the black and white portraits, but would “destroy” in another colour, randomly chosen. So a completely “overpainted” canvas with colour, in the context of a series, would appear like a destroyed self portrait, that it actually never was.