Jeremy Glogan

Of all the plastic arts there is only real consensus on what a painting is. Everyone agrees what a painting is even though they often pretend that they don't. There is no such thing as an expanded painting. An expanded painting is an installation. Or a sculpture. And there is no consensus on what either of them are. The conditions of possibility for painting in the 2020s are not the same conditions of possibility for painting in the 1940s. But neither are they the conditions of possibility for painting in the 2000s. And in fact they're maybe closer to the former than the latter.

The conditions of possibility for painting are always a series of mediations. These mediations are a successive series of nows.

It once seemed like there were very high stakes in the divide between abstract and figurative painting. This was always a false dichotomy, but it is more of a false dichotomy than ever in the 2020s. In actuality, the divide in painting is, and has always been, between paintings which actively skirt their constitutive series of nows and those which ignite upon them.

For a painting to ignite upon its series of nows, its production and reception cannot be consciously interested. Instead, both must be actively impassive, in a receptive relation to otherness which is experienced as unmediated precisely due to the fact that it is as highly mediated as possible.

This requires humility on the part of both artist and viewer, but the onus is more on the former than the latter. The active impassivity of the painter is as liberated as it is false; the more false it is, the more it promises truth.

—Daniel Neofetou, October 2024