Universal Painter.

Phil King.
“The term of information, which assumes a kind of objective truth, entails the
exhaustion of the forms of metamorphosis, of illusion, whereas writing is on the
contrary one of the places where there is always something that escapes you,
that is impossible to master.”

- Jean Baudrillard

Is there such a possibility of such a things as a ‘universal

painter’? What would such an animal be like now? Impossible
Chimera. Incredibly contradictory and impossible perhaps,
certainly unfathomable, without measure, and twisting in and
out of the coordinated digital realm that absorbs us into its
swelling organs, consuming our need to continually collect
and buy things. This impossible beast would be a unique
multitude perhaps, a divisible individuality twisting in the
wind, hunted as a target, got ready for the BBQ , organised as
a field across hand held devices and coordinated and
accounted for screen time. Disorganisation personified. An
impossible form whose liver might be capable of patterning
visual information, whose overworked kidneys might crystalise
unheard of forms of visual knowledge. Visible to its eyes and
ours as a form of craft based handiwork, a pattering whose
rhythms create the sense of a fluid, malleable ambition like a
flock of birds shifting together in the heavens, insisting on a
real sense of resistance and actuality and a sense that history
itself is being made personal, contained in a single heart.
Painterly work ethic becomes transformed, needled into a
form of wayward hallucination where intimate pointillist grids
swirl around likenesses, within the all consuming universe of
universal painter’s touch. Appearances that appear because,
and despite, of concentration on the immediate patterns of
intensely worked painterly surfaces in which images shift and
turn in a simple but effective form of visual animation. We are
caught in and transported by the resulting paintings. Light is
created in a form of ‘op-art’ and we can lose ourselves in
historical likenesses, in the appearance of animated figures
within the light of endlessly inventive, hand crafted
illuminations. We are part of this painterly beast as it plays
with transience and various countries work-ethics dissolve in
the light of a generalised embrace of encyclopaedic
computerised horizons. There’s a sense that we, at some point
in this universe began to surf algorithmic waves, the
complexity of counted bits is taken up and matched by work
ethic, but we cannot see, or even conceive, of such labour.
Handiwork mimics digital complexities, whose power is
actually in its sense of vanishing. Art Historical waves crash in
backlit oblivions, and there is an unsettling sense of motion
sickness that takes hold and insists, at least until the power is
turned off. Long term inhabitation of personal computing
puts us in a somewhat dehumanised zone in line with the
machinery of anti-art historical art historical ancestors. The
new universality inherits and lays out modernist forms of
mechanic eroticisms, sexual difference is de-realised,
programmed and codified, and artificial categories insisted
upon for efficiencies sake. De-realisation and cutting up into
digestible slices forms the raison d’être of cannibalisations of
modernist masteries and yet disappearance is insisted upon as
a founding principle by this studio bound lurching behemoth,
painting fine details with exquisite taste. Different sensibilities
slipstream together in a join endeavour, a painter reborn in
waves of history, of light, where appearance and
disappearance are worked over and presented together, each
oeuvre committed to and questioning of the others in this
ambitious universal brain drain. Together the differences, at
first merely mimicking digital automatism in its countless
accountings, seem to have become innumerable, un-ordinated;
multiplicities at odds with the ever more restrictive discipline
of overall counted coordination that supposedly forms the
matrixes of our existences, that supposedly has replaced the
immediacy of history itself. ‘Glitches’, ‘hand-crafted
animation’, eyes reduced to dysfunctional apparatus, become
events able to put us up close within the working of shared
visions in a kind of technicolour fiction larger than any
bankrupt personal computing account. Maybe Zeitgeist is
something revealed in the nature of surprising gaps. Maybe
our painter is merely a splint in the matrix, a vain last throw
of the dice.. Each part insists on a form of resistance to the
known and counted history or spirit of the age whose ordered
mind their universe apparently inhabits. Maybe this universal
painter is precisely who or what isn’t there, a horizon jumbled
and hidden by the impact of insistent buildings and objects, by
the crushing needs of architectural mosaics, of actual forests
and mountains. Perhaps it is because of the profound
groundlessness discovered in desert vistas and laid out in work
and endless drives that we find ourselves insisting on the
material force of all the hand sized stones, waiting to be
picked up around us in Portuguese Pavements and the
implications of the hand held devices, the rocks that surround
and overwhelms us. And the work then sweeps errant thoughts
into painting’s immediate patterning, and the universal notion
draws us into a form of disassociated hallucination, showing
us a way to surrender to historical revery beyond the mosaic
actuality of crushing pedestrian reality. Realism painstakingly
served up as shifting readings of familiar figures caught and
created by the webs that defines them. Our gigantic fictional
artist calls their work History Painting while simultaneously
slipping off to the desert outside and work against
disappearance while disappearing into the light. Universalised
work as a means of preserving the fugitive nature of images,
specifically images of large social gatherings and events
participated in or observed, and this insistent History is
maintained through a finely observed shared labour time. By
nature caught in the fugitive, no words are carved in stone,
while our painter’s painterly observations deliberately use
lasting fine-art materials on an ambitiously realised scale,
tuning colours on-screen and vectoring across entire
continents. Everything becomes a surface in which shared
perceptions become embedded, a surface that counts but
remains unaccounted for. This imagined imaginary painter is
a teamwork, is countless disciplined hands and backs ground
down by the digitalised labour value that we heedlessly walk
across. Leisure and protest are reimagined in mythic detail
and here, now, we are provoked to remember the beach under
the hand carved cobble stones at our fingertips.