Painting as a Continuous Scenario
Protocols for Experiencing an Idea
Working on a cycle of paintings inspired by models in classical painting proves to be a rather daring task and a complex mystery. The complexity also stems from the utopian intention for the paintings to be executed through the notion that the event (the process) occurs in the distant future. A future in which knowledge of the world and the Universe becomes holistic, integral, and absolute to a degree capable of causing radical aberrations in the poetics and metaphors of the chosen pictorial works. At the beginning of the text, it is appropriate to introduce a preliminary caveat: namely, that the author is aware of positioning his project in a treacherously unsystematized temporal gap, where passing linear time contradicts an imaginarily added timelessness, albeit under an artistic pretext. Without the above caveat, the experience of the idea—which still appears dreamy, fanciful, and/or implicit—is unattainable.
Martin Heidegger argues that experience is always linked to the act of cognition, and cognition, in turn, is linked to understanding.[1] The confidence to proceed with the realization (i.e., the experience) of the project, despite the conceptual challenges that arose, was supported by a fact proven by neuroscience[2]; the phenomenon that every individual’s brain knows what its (the individual’s) decision will be before it is consciously realized. In other words, the brain predicts what will happen, what you will see, after you move your eyes. That is, the brain thinks in perspective. Its drive to “peek” and predict the future occurs in the presence of a paradoxical opposition that seems to have appeared secondarily for balance. People, in general, are always one step behind their thoughts.
The present “writing/scripture” should be perceived as a strategy for experiencing the idea, aiming to discover potential markers in personal artistic time. These, in turn, should facilitate the application of the apocrypha hidden in the brain during the understanding and realization of the author’s idea. Can a possible extrapolation of classical paintings into the future serve as a model for making sense of (understanding) the personal scenario in the lingering today of painting?
Since one of the methods of experience is defined as “writing,” it is logical to delve into the content and etymology of the word. In Old Bulgarian, the first literary Slavic language, the verb “пьсати” means to write, to inscribe, to paint”[3][4]. Some sources mention its Indo-European character, with an origin close to the word “пъстър” (variegated/colorful), with the original meaning “to make variegated, to decorate.” The word “пьсати” originally meant “to depict something by carving or applying paints, to paint.” Later, with the appearance of literacy, it referred to the image of the writings (letters)[5].
Some of the oldest known “writings” are drawings on cave walls and/or clay tablets. The earliest texts in Classical Greek using the Greek alphabet were formatted in a continuous string of capital letters from right to left. This type of continuous writing is called Scriptio continua (scriptura continua is the Latin expression for “continuous writing”) and was used in the Etruscan civilization, as well as in Greco-Roman antiquity. Before (and after) the appearance of the codex (book), Latin and Greek texts were written on scrolls by scribes. Their role was to create documentation by recording everything they heard. Since speech is continuous, no spaces were marked. The reader of the text was a trained interpreter, assumed to know the scenario and to have memorized the content and the breaks in the text. If a medieval lecturer dictated to scribes from a manuscript written in Scriptio continua and misread a word, it would be recorded incorrectly. In a subjective interpretation, in a changed context and in the absence of syntax, the scenario and the memory of the meaning of the incorrectly recorded text change. The phenomenon is described as a process of memory reconsolidation[6]. A memory is only as real as the last time you recalled it. The reader falls into a situation of logical paradox—the compromised meaning provides more freedom to interpret the text. What Joseph Conrad said about geographical maps also applies to the brain: the most interesting places are the empty ones, as only they are subject to change. Jonah Lehrer reminds us of this, interpreting Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” and explains: “Every time we remember something, the neural structure of our memory changes slightly—a process known as reconsolidation. The memory changes in the absence of the original stimulus, and the share of memory in it decreases, at the expense of the share of your own personality.”[7]
Inspiration from the works of Velázquez prevails in the choice of classical works to be interpreted. The former delight of a “face to face” encounter with “The Three Musicians” in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie is unforgettable. We recognize that experienced delight later in a sense of festivity; on the day the author’s daughter turned seven, a small painting appeared—a girl with a cake. The portrait of the child was inspired by Velázquez’s infantas. The memory of the small painting gradually fades, and its “reconsolidation” is activated by recognizing it (despite fatal damage) among an improvised junk dealer’s stall…
It is placed in contre-jour on the sill of the opposite window. In places where the primer has fallen off, light shines through the holes in the canvas, transforming the residual pictorial information coming from the aquarium-window. We liken it to a vessel with a vibrating strange constellation; something that reminds us that memory, and the feelings and ideas associated with it, live (and survive) outside (and despite) time. Proust says that “the memory of the past is not necessarily the memory of the truth. There is an arbitrary element in memories and they do not mind small lies.”[8]. When a memory is provoked by a work of art, or in our case by a pictorial work, what happens to its metaphors? Do they, freed from their time, remain in the past with the residual and modified memory of former experiences? Does a potential for an explosion accumulate, capable of translating them through the shell of their time into the future? Here the fundamental question arises—is it possible, and how, to introduce metaphors from the not-yet-existent into the existing in my new project?
According to Hans Blumenberg, light (including that seeping through the holes in the canvas) is itself a metaphor whose history is “most closely linked to the problem of truth. The metaphorics of light cannot be translated back into concepts; the analysis is directed towards discovering the questions to which an answer is sought and offered, questions of a pre-systemic nature, whose intentional integrity seems to have provoked the metaphors.”[9] It seems the philosopher, who fundamentally investigates the question of metaphors, somehow indirectly encourages us not to fear that our modest intention might be considered naivety. Apparently shaken by the case described above, the stirred sediment of memory is freed from the doom of its temporal settlement to pass into a new essence. An essence in which memory does not reconcile with the bottom of the past and, through continuous rebirths, leaps freely into the future.
There, in the future, wanders the new hypostasis of memory, somehow allowed to be recognized through a condescending resignation to mask itself in visualized metaphors understandable to the author’s contemporaries. We find the scenario of the masquerade in translation by Carlo Rovelli[10]—one of the leading contemporary theoretical physicists, “gifted with the rare skill of conveying the most complex scientific theories in an understandable and engaging form.” We realize that along with our memories, we are immersed in a space “that ripples, bends, curves, and twists like a giant plastic mollusk[11].”
Rovelli’s theoretical physics, presented as “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,” figuratively directs our curiosity towards jellyfish. We learn about the existence of the immortal jellyfish—an impressive, untouchable, and eternal species. Their unthinkable quality—immortality—in my imagination places them alongside other objects burdened by us with this quality: masterpieces of art. The cycle closes. Having originated in the author’s artistic subconscious and intuition, with utopian, blurred, and vague boundaries, the idea gradually frees itself from the initial fantasy delusion to discover and operate with new images and metaphors. Through them, in his new project, the author hopes to realize in paintings and exhibit a scenario rewritten in the future of that which artistically explained the world in the past.
[1] Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Sofia, Marin Drinov Academic Publishing House, 2005
[2] Theories of dynamic predictive coding are postulated by Grace Edwards, Petra Vetter, Fiona McGruer, Lucy S. Petro & Lars Muckli, “Predictive feedback to V1 dynamically updates with sensory input”, //Scientific Reports volume 7, 28 November 2017
[3] In the novel “The Glass River,” Emil Andreev, speaking of the Bogomils through one of his characters—Viktor, explains the root of the word “писач” (scribe/writer)
[4] See: писать in the etymological online dictionary of Krylov G. A.; писать in the etymological online dictionary of Vasmer M.
[5] The neuron doctrine was first defended by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906.
[6] Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, East-West, 2012
[7] Ibid. Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, East-West, 2012, p. 125
[8] Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Sofia: Critique and Humanism, 2015, 272 pp. 19-20
[9] Carlo Rovelli (born 1956, Verona, Italy) – Italian and American theoretical physicist, specialist in the field of quantum gravity and specifically in the theory of loop quantum gravity
[10] The idea of Einstein’s general theory of relativity postulates that the gravitational field is not in space, but is in fact space itself. That is, space is one of the material components of the world.
