Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:
Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!
— Charles Baudelaire
For I have, to enchant those submissive lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my large, wide eyes of eternal brightness!
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
I’m trying to demonstrate through painting a phenomena of being consciously aware. The “clarifying and concentrating of material experience” as John Dewey describes in Art as Experience is what these paintings make possible but do not guarantee. Dewey says and I agree “a work of art does not lead to another experience of the world; it is an experience” The experience that interests me is phenomenological.
I’ve limited the paintings to vertical and horizontal divisions of space and high chroma color. If a color occurs in more than one quadrant its placement is coordinated and balanced in the whole. My hope is that the paintings can be understood as encouraging your participation in the ordering process. Through this active looking you get the experience which is a realization of a set of rules.
Each painting is an experience of place. The desert of Baja Mexico is a distinct place. A painting can be its own place, the difference being how directly it presents sensations. Seeing a Mondrian painting in a room you feel yourself using your eyes. Everything you are seeing couldn’t be more specific and directed. The familiar grid structure is an essential aspect of the seeing experience. If there was any more to it their wouldn’t be a space and place of a Mondrian. I try to make paintings that are about the experience of their specific qualities and not affirmations of the idea of art outside of themselves.
Each painting is its own place.
Each painting has its own light.
Each painting is its own character.
Each painting is a sensation.
Each painting is an experience.
“Solidification of the light, of the wind”
“Touch the foundations of the world”
—Denis Coutagne on Cezanne from an interview by Judith Benhamou