Performance

A character tries to interpret the patterns in what seems to be an abstract expressionist painting as a market chart.

Performed at the Van Eyck Open studios 2015

performance text
He abandoned physical contact with the canvas. Instead he flung streams of paint towards it. Perfecting a technique where swirls of paint form temporal sculptures in mid air. Turning the patterns on the canvas into two-dimensional fingerprints of their three-dimensional motion.

Standing in front of one of his canvases one is overcome by a dense web of interweaving swirls of paint, creating a sensation unusual in the observer. A profound feeling of tremendous velocity and chaos takes hold of our senses. It’s colorful patterns moving and shaking us. What is this peculiar mixture of paint doing? What does it want? What does it need? Does it need to be restrained? Does it need to be told what to do? Stagnating into stories, depictions?

No! It wants to move. It needs to move. Forwards, up, down, left, right and back again, increasing its velocity while slowing down, all in one gesture. Bringing forth rhythmic suffusions of color, only telling of its moods and atmospheres. Its motion is somehow like a wave spreading outward from the disturbance of a liquid yet freer and more complex.

Oh It is impossible not to admire this riot of colors. Its obscure distillation generates juices, salivas, yeasts. A testimony to the ability of paint to make a striking assault upon the nervous system.
The patterns on the painting’s surface seem to run endlessly deep into the painting, like an abyss of chaotic swirls of paint. As if we are looking into a space that is not in keeping with our common notions of reality. It g presents a complex dampness of patterns, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues capable of challenge and creation. A turbulent spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being boldly exchanging order, regularity for the privilege to tremble and multiply.

It forms patterns which explode, irregular veins branching out in all directions, then suddenly tapering away. What is surprising is its tortured symmetry, its system of angles striving to achieve a pattern. A geometry without the will to finish what it has begun, yet building upon itself in endless variations building simultaneously in and outside its own logic.

One is overcome by these sensations when looking at the painting, And although the vision the eye records is often impoverished and uncertain, recent analyses of the painting have confirmed these impressions. By making use of x-ray scans and microscopes self-similar patterns have been found to run deeper and deeper into the painting. Each part feeding onto itself, perpetuating its seemingly chaotic movement, creating an endless web of non-linear feedback. Every line followed by another similar line, ever smaller and deeper into the layers of paint the further one dives into the painting the more patterns showing self-a nity occur on microscopic levels deeper and deeper into the painting. Up until this day no end has been found. When observing the paint on the smallest possible scale It sometimes appears to move,to pulsate almost. As if it is telling us something..
What is it? What does it want?

Within these splotches and splashes one can observe movements that, appear to be in accordance to the behavior of more complex systems, As if its reacting to something, reacting to to the movements of gasses and liquids yet also stockprices and futures. e patterns appear to somehow chart the interactions between them, even to predict them - Like an in nite library of all the possible move- ments of stocks. Turning the canvas into a a vast terra incognito stretching over billions of yoctometers ready to be mined...

All this produced by a stubby paint encrusted brush!?What was his mind tapping into when he painted these patterns?
When we see him work, we see a man whose entire body seems attuned to an order existing outside himself. Working feverishly, applying paint in short, decisive bursts. His movements, slow at first, gradually becoming faster, more like a dance. His body in a reciprocal relationship to the material, the flowing of paint determining his posture, helping him attune to a force yet to be known

I urge you to look at all these colors, its patterns, its behavior. To observe it, to analyze it. Yet, this?is simply not enough. We need to eat it. We need to open our mouths so that it can enter us, trem- bling all of our bodies It’s splotches of color should be taken inIts Material trembling undergone , entering via the esophagus, creeping down mixing with our bodily fluids, making use of our archi- tecture, our veins its mode of transportation. It needs to move us, it needs to enter and shake us. Only then would we understand the true implications of this discovery. If we truly want come to an understanding We need to erase our limits, to reject divisions, to do away all prohibitions, and then to ask, what has become of our knowledge. We have to twist it, To make it vibrate. To seize hold of it somehow And then to render it in order to wrest the percepts from perceptions. e a ect from a ections e sensation from opinion.

This, this is its language, a language before language. An expression before it is expressed, before it manifests itself, like mists or dews. A brief yet patient haze, coming forth momentarily, its suspended particles slowly impelling. A feeling, not yet a feeling, present somehow, in its movement, in its liquidity, in its deforming symmetry. Creating a rimless placeless zone
where there is no more reliance on the propositional force of language on meaning.
Where the intent never is to signify, but only to in uence. And linguistic communication is replaced by movements that jerk twitch and shu e our bodies. We should give in to this overwhelming loud- ness, to move and twitch in endless webs of nonlinear feedback.
Drowning out all speech. Thank you.