La Vista Totale: Apologia

A note on multistylism: Both the holographic model and Maturana's views on autopoesis and the 'multiversa' incline me towards a multistylist approach to painting. As the individual has been traditionally associated with a signature style as the manifestion of identity, the current speculations about biology, physics, culture and psychology lead away from the assumed parallel of individual 'bodyhood' with individual identity. The single body can be seen as supporting multiple identities pathologically, as in multiple personality disorder, or nonpathologically as in Heinz von Foerster's implication of a "multiple personality order" by his claim," I am not one man but a whole collection of people." In art, the pioneers of this approach have been sequential (Picasso, Picabia, Lucio Pozzi) or concurrent (Richter), concurrent but compartmentalized (Ellsworth Kelly) or both concurrent and sequential in a non programmatic relationship (de Chirico). I aim to explore this further in my work as I believe that multistylism is the most compelling frontier for visual art in these times.

I am interested in style, especially its psychological significance. I regard style, in the practice of painting as enacted by a professional painter - by that, meaning a painter who works out of continuous daily practice - as something which emerges unconsciously out of the altered state of consciousness - or trance - to which the artist submits in the course of the practice.

While planning, ideas, and theory may set the stage for an artwork, or attend its postmortem, the process from which style emerges is a special state in which attention is focused, narrowed, filtered and distorted in a way that resembles, in turns, autism, paranoia, meditative states and "split personality." The afterglow of the experience can even resemble mania (after a period of time) or mystical experience.

 

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