“In fact, the chief function of mass culture is to relieve one of the necessity of experiencing one’s life directly. Serious art, too, is separated from reality, for it permits one to contemplate experience without being personally involved; but it is not an evasion: by its very detachment, it opens up new possibilities of understandings and pleasure derivable from reality, and thus becomes an enrichment of experience.”
-Robert Warshow
Beauty is overwhelming. It exists in too many places at once to be delineated into words. It is, however, exactly that inevitable search for articulation which allows our sense of wonder to overwhelm us. When I try to think of beauty, I’m left with memories of experience where honest or sincere articulations grew out of life experiencing new things. I don’t mean new things in terms of inventions, conveniences, or progress within objective reality. I am referring more to the conclusions we reach individually without being told to. These conclusions form by empathetically viewing the world in front of us as a product of personal investigation in which everything is either growing or decaying with its own past and future. Immersing ourselves in life, sitting in nature, and surrounding ourselves with energy that doesn’t ask anything from us or tell us how to view it brings the world to its base components: weight and energy. Patiently observing these two elements experience each other within our immediate individual reality only brings to light how incredible it is that our consciousness exists at all. It also reveals the absurd idea that reality could ever be understood as a singular objective experience when our world is only an interpretation limited to our senses. It becomes even more absurd that the more we think we understand the world; the more technological efficiency limits our already limited sense of reality.
On an individual scale, we all construct the world outside of this immediate moment differently. We use visualized internal constructs and signifiers which we derive from a combination of both individualized sensory information and selectively imported perceptions of mass culture. In the face of the information revolution, our natural tendency to digest sensory information is overwhelmed by the imported perceptions of mass culture. In this state of over stimulation, our identity is then built with information rather than experience. Through this assimilation of mass culture into our reality, we are cementing our position by acknowledging the physical existence of intangible realities that give us tangible information. In other words we are technically psychotic. We understand a megabyte, even though it exists no where in space or time, but only within the system that supports it. It is real because we agree it is and as a result we are locked in that system. We acknowledge a higher brain. The information contained in that virtual memory needs only your opinion because you are removed from the experience by a synthetic second party with which you cannot argue.
In the same way that truth can only be an agreement between two parties, color is experience between sensory observation and our brains. These paintings are abstractions of experience and observation. They are separate realities built on the recursion of visualizing the immediate experience of existence while letting the painting become its own reality through the human desire to think abstractly and find meaning within form and color. Regardless to the wealth of information derived from the human search for meaning, that information cannot communicate any meaning without a personal search behind it. In other words, there is no way to tell you what to see. The immediate experience of personally viewing these paintings asks you to step outside of what you know and wonder what you don’t. The only boundaries in sight are self imposed by the act of understanding. Looking through concepts extracted from personal experience rather than imported information reveals a state of wonder that deals with infinity. The investigation exists outside of time and outside of separation by uniting all of us through our engagement with the present moment. What anything actually means is personal and essentially doesn’t matter as long as we, as individuals, recognize the limits of our understanding and the unity of its absence.
