"This exhibition is a way of understanding painting based on the transformation of the pictorial genre. Its core thesis is the fact that painting has ceased to occupy a central and solid position in contemporary art because it has been displaced by other more recent disciplines such as video art, photography, and installation, etc. Painting has become vulnerable, fragile; but this enquiry, far from debilitating it, has in fact stimulated a change and development in the practice of painting.
In the last hundred years or so, painting has been declared dead on a number of occasions and for very different reasons: for being illusionist, for playing into the market system, for not being a medium of ideas but merely a provider of sensations... The last decade saw a certain hostility resurface with regard to the painterly after the flowering of the trans-avant-gardes of the 1980s. One of the arguments used against it was its excessive cultural baggage. Since it had come from the pinnacle of the arts hierarchy, it could not shed the connotations that such a position entailed: authority, property. This situation would mark out a clearly defined and closed aesthetic arena that imposed formal and conceptual limits. These would be transmitted unconsciously and insidiously, and without our realising we would be painting with inherited tools and devices that would deprive the medium of its ability to surprise, to renew itself. While these observations on painting have so far been of a cultural order, with no reference made to the material qualities of painting, they lose validity the moment that painting sheds these connotations. To do this, artists today have to be capable of dismantling this hierarchy and working with painting on an equal footing with regard to the other disciplines. That's why the model of the multimedia artist is so important: because it dismantles the structure of artistic genres, thereby preventing their hierarchisation.
Painting, then, is adequate when it is considered as just another medium and not as an end in itself. For the artists taking part in this exhibition, painting is not the central motif of their creative thinking, they don't confine their activity to a strictly painterly sphere, they don't defend the genre's essentialness (indeed, most of these artists work in other areas of art too). They use painting, photography and video with a clearly-defined purpose which is largely determined by their physical, visual and cultural qualities. So it's not really a question of techniques or formats, but of attitude.
The problem of the medium has a bearing on other issues that figure recurrently in the debate on painting: the genre is criticised for its staticism, its stable configuration, its physicity. It is believed that these qualities inherent to painting incapacitate it as a vehicle for transmitting aspects of contemporary reality, which is more fragmentary, changing, and virtual in nature, and better suited to electronic media and information networks. What I propose is a rejection of this polarisation of aesthetic concepts (material versus virtual, immediate versus mediated, static versus temporary...) that so often accompanies discussions on genre.
Just as a film can convey a sense of staticism and materiality (the material qualities and contemplative tempo of Tarkovsky, for example), so a static and material medium such as painting can allude to fleeting and non-material realities. The paintings shown in this exhibition are therefore not presented as an alternative to the technological media or the temporary arts, but rather as a dialogue held between both in a space interweaved by cultural relationships.
In that sense, this exhibition also aspires to help "normalize" the art scene so that painting is accepted as just another aesthetic option and technique available to contemporary artists. It is for this reason that we have chosen to confine the exhibition to the genre of painting (albeit understood in its broadest -contemporary- sense), and avoid the usual trick of modernising painting exhibitions by including supporting video, installation, and photography.
So the work is created in a transaction, an exchange between the artistic and cultural environments. It is not an introspective, quiet work, but an outgoing and even noisy one. Design, illustration, publicity, television, photography, film, sociology, architecture, urban planning... are implicit in this exhibition in the same measure that the painting is explicit.
As a consequence, the heterogeneity, hybridization, and mix of cultural ideas, attitudes and practices characteristic of the present day are also present in painting. Styles are juxtaposed and superposed freely; images are appropriated, manipulated and returned to the sphere of the public; concepts are reutilised, recycled, in this ongoing "post production" process described by Nicolas Bourriaud.
The way of understanding painting I propose here is inscribed in a new model of artistic dynamics based on the idea of mutation. Mutation is a random process of genetic transformation which enables species to evolve by virtue of their adaptation to the medium. The dynamics of avant-gardist progress conclude in post modernity, when all possibility of progress in art is denied. In contrast to this way of thinking, the metaphor of a mutant art asserts the possibility of change, not of autonomous, idealistic and utopian change like that which infused the avant-gardes, but of evolution behind the inevitable transformation of society. Like a mutant being, painting both develops strategies of adaptation to a similarly dynamic context and is instrumental to the transformation of that context."
