Artist’s Statement
8 x 10
Light on Canvas
Antonio Dias
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I interrupted my painting career in 1999. I found the situation for an undiscovered artist problematic back then. There was an active international marketplace in contemporary art for recognized artists. Contemporary art was still riding its own bubble. The way in seemed beyond me. Various flavors of avante-guarde art abounded, but they appeared as closed as any conservative Academy in the Nineteenth Century. Art was Modern – any rebellion against “Modernism” as a “movement” was still firmly made from within a modernist world-view. Even “Post-Modernism” was a reaction to an earlier style, one that did little to challenge any of the overall assumptions behind the entire enterprise. I was neither suited, nor committed, to the work of courting connections and making my way in that environment. Things have changed. Art “markets” are reeling along with the rest. On the other hand, it is now much easier to go directly “to the people” on the web, by-passing the traditional gatekeepers. It’s also become clear that not only is “Big M” Modernism obsolete, but overall, Business As Usual is teetering on the brink. It’s all up in the air. Paradoxically, I feel more at home in this world.
I’ve spent much of the last few years thinking and writing on our current predicament on Horizons of Significance. I’ve also found a community of thinkers, writers, and some artists who are engaged in a similar questioning of our circumstances. This rough assemblage can be approached through the Dark Mountain Project. I’ve been fortunate to have an excerpt from my second novel, Something for Nothing, published in their Dark Mountain 2 anthology. Writing, both as a process, and in its output; ephemeral, object-less words in the aether; has allowed me to approach art in a way that has helped me side-line Ego and connect with what David Bohm calls Mind. I’ve developed a relationship with “my” work in which I recognized that I am the recipient of what comes to me, not its maker. This has removed the fiction-of-control demanded by Ego and replaced it with an attitude of acceptance and gratitude. I’m still working out the implications of this new relationship to creativity.
I return to painting much more integrated as a person and as an artist. I see painting as an important part of a practice that helps me connect with what David Abram has called “the Plenitude of Being.” Painting and paintings have always been important to me. The practice of painting, and its objects, generate an interaction with our world undertaken at the level of direct perception. There is a materiality in painting, and paintings, that is grounded in perception and in the potency of its surfaces as passageways. By reflection, refraction, transparency, and translucency a surface stands for a field; like a sky, the visual field of perception itself, or the field upon which our physical “brain” interacts with universal Mind. Painting taps into a powerful mimesis. Paint on canvas can appear to the eye as almost anything, while maintaining its integrity as a frozen liquid medium. It is surface, it is what we see in it, and it generates a world made up of light itself.
I long ago rejected the notion that there is any validity to a drive towards reductivism. It is not possible to maintain arbitrary constraints on our perceptions when we are confronted with a canvas and pigment. We bring our entire experience to bear in confronting a work of art. This realization has come out of my questioning modernism in its deepest and broadest sense. This has removed much of my earlier confusion and ambivalence. I return to painting with a new clarity. A sense that painting is a viable medium in which to work and that it can bring something of value to our world.
It’s with these thoughts in mind that I’ve renewed my commitment to painting. I’m heartened and excited by what I’ve experienced back in the studio, and by the prospects to come. I hope you find something here that engages you in some way, and I look forward to connecting with you through my art.
All of my paintings are oil on canvas, wood, or Masonite panel. My drawings are graphite or charcoal on archival paper. Dimensions are in inches, width x height, without frames.
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