2023

This year started with intense plein air work in oils. My skill gradually improved and I continued till June when I realized that I was simply repeating something I knew how to do. There were two problems:

• The problem of the subject: I felt that I was following a pre-conceived idea of what e.g. a landscape painting should look like and it was rather narrow, dictated by my cultural baggage. There was the need to find a new type of subject and/or composition.
• The problem of rendition: I wanted to avoid flat areas of color and achieve a more raw and organic look.

For a change I put oils on hold and switched to watercolors. I was never happy with my watercolors before, but in June I managed to do a few works that I liked. It seemed that simplicity and being slightly out of control was part of the recipe. At the time I still thought that the value of my art was purely visual, so I started looking more at Paul Cézanne and the whole array of abstract art of the twentieth century in order to figure out the way forward.

I briefly considered going abstract, but then again I could not decide how I would do it. To do abstract art one needs to select an approach or a procedure. I could think of a few options, but how to choose one approach over the other? The choice is arbitrary unless it is justified. This was a similar problem to the one I had in 2022 with respect to intentional changes in the way perceived reality is depicted. More fundamentally, going abstract meant to opt for beauty instead of truth which I found unacceptable. Therefore I continued figurative work.

Interestingly, the “insight” of abstraction stuck with me around August and the beginning of September, but I could not renounce my way of painting reality exactly as I saw it, so I had to go around and find already existing objects that would exhibit desirable qualities from a visual point of view. Around mid-September I realized that I was trying to marry two incompatible approaches, so I gave up on thinking about the visual impact in my work.

In late September I concluded that it didn’t matter what artworks looked like, since there were already all kinds of artworks out there. Cosmetic considerations were not abandoned, but they stopped being central. What mattered was how artworks were made and the intention behind them. I accepted that I had always been a realist and that I should be building something on top of realism. I also started to think about what others must be seeing in this or that painting and what I wanted them to see. The subject matter changed in order to guide the viewer towards seeing only raw reality. In a few months real realism was formulated as a full-fledged artistic approach. Real realism naturally united many ideas that until then seemed random and unrelated. It also converted me from a visual artist into a perception artist. Now painting was only a pretext for a more thorough investigation of reality and the artworks were but a side-effect of that investigation.

74 artworks: 37 oils, 27 photographs, and 10 others