O-N-T-O-L-O-G-Y. Painting Exhibition

About

In an age of rapidly consumed data and images, painting as an art retains special powers and privileges; those of careful construction, patient organisation, and extended duration. O-N-T-O-L-O-G-Y presents three painters whose work looks away from the image-world, even from the idea of ‘image’ itself, to the persistence of painting in its fundamental constitution as object, which is to say an articulate and evolved arrangement of densities, rhythms and forms made for the purpose of being presented to a viewer. In this, the work comes close to the ambitions of those Cubists who believed that painting and constructed object-hood were one and the same. The result is a category of art in which, as Sartre more recently suggested, many agencies play an essential part. It is the joint effort of an artist and a viewer, he said, “which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.”