What do I understand by what is contained in the title of my discourse? Universal painting, including various aspects of graphic language, responds to a communicative impulse that begins from the human self in order to create signs that are not always pictorial. It does so with the desire to transcend towards the other and to become recognizable through an operation in which the individual phenomenon would lack meaning if it remained enclosed within the self and did not reach exteriority and the understanding of otherness.
A painting, however abstract it may be, is not complete except through its ability to become external and to be observed by another individuality. In many cases, these are rather hermetic and irrational languages, except for those initiated who are able to connect with their meaning. Already in the Paleolithic period, traces can be found in engravings or highly abstract and cosmogonic graphics, sometimes with a merely ornamental character, transferring onto the surface where they lie certain reminiscences of language and a spatial relationship that externalizes a communicative impulse. Sometimes they are simple signs or arabesques, as in the case of the rangolis of the Indian-Asian continent. They are ornaments, a priori, with something cosmogonic about them, and within their sphere there exist codes of interpretation so that they become externalized and communicate something tangible to the observer, which could ultimately be reduced to mere aesthetic and decorative enjoyment.
I understand pictorial practice as the creative capacity of the individual, which later acquires a subjective value that becomes external insofar as it is social and communicative. Its function in itself is the knowledge of that being absorbed within itself, searching for a transcendent abstract universal through its exteriority in relation to its surroundings.
I have always observed the work of certain celebrated painters through their depictions of motherhood, as is the case with Bellini and others. For me, such representations have always been an extended image of painting itself: the infant wrapped in its mother’s lap, dependent on her in order to live, to begin expressing itself, and to come to know itself through that mediation. Now I represent myself in an equivalent situation, and for this reason I speak of Mother Painting and the relationship that painters establish with that sublime Mother, which may contain nuances of the Universal Absolute — a concept biologically charged with significant weight in language and communication, and which psychologically creates a clear Oedipal dependency.
To grow is to paint. Through this real and practical phenomenon we can access the world of the universal, where we break away from — or must approach — independence and a personal relationship with the world, with the phenomena that take place within it, and which grant access to a vertical growth, personal-spiritual and immanent. The concept is absolute in its reality and in its logical and real categories. Painting is at once the mother that generates and regenerates our life, and the daughter through its practice. That is why I define painters as an anarchic and precarious fraternity, all children of this Mother Painting.
One day, not far from now, I will create a website where we can give our own news and promote what rigorously creates value, both critically and through the appearance of images. Texts by painters and rigorous, clear, and eloquent pictorial theories, as well as news about philosophy and speculative discourses, more or less formal and controversial. With this, I defend the manual nature inherent to pictorial making and the conceptualism that belongs to it, against the conceptual practice so fashionable in the present age. My attitude must be clarifying and rigorous, like every desire for dialogical learning.
The hand and painting. The hand is fundamental in painting. Our consciousness in action, while working, is historically and neurologically connected with it and with the entire organism of the acting subject. All our organs converge in that hand, or hands, which are responsible for generating a phenomenon that is initially subjective and internal, towards something external. Thus, painting rises through one language into another that can operate outwardly and communicate the interior and subjective aspect of the act itself towards another individual who observes and, in turn, interprets our personal emotions. Painting is basically a language that does not acquire reality until it is observed, interpreted, and internalized by another; hence its strictly social and disseminating action. Painting is the mother of universal and absolute knowledge, provided that it is disseminated in order to connect with different observers, initiated or not, since every language can stimulate diverse communicative responses.
A long series of artist-painters have devoted themselves to unraveling their activity through speech or writing, whether in interviews, correspondence, or in a didactic manner. Already in the Renaissance, Leonardo wrote a meticulous treatise on painting. Cézanne and some Constructivists also wrote about painting, as did Mondrian, followers of Theosophy. Malevich never ceased developing his theory of Suprematism; Picasso through his verbal statements and correspondence, sometimes tinged with cynicism; Salvador Dalí through his delirious and histrionic profusion of contributions and his application of the paranoid-critical method in accordance with the paradigmatic figure of Doctor Freud. Otto Rank, another psychoanalyst, wrote Art and Artist, an edition presented to readers as an introspective reading of creative activity. Likewise Kandinsky and many representatives of the Bauhaus, architects such as Le Corbusier, and many other creators from different disciplines such as Andy Warhol, Rothko, or John Cage.
The Minimalists and Post-Minimalists, Freemasons, the most radical revolutionaries, some fascists, and many writers, filmmakers, choreographers, and even insignificant “petit-maîtres”. Gauguin, the Symbolists, even artists such as Duchamp or poets who left behind valuable testimonies that I do not wish to expand upon here. Another occasion and another time will allow me to enlarge upon these matters in my memoirs. Little by little, what I can clarify is the concept and definition of Mother Painting and my personal struggle, in actu exercito, so that the trembling and faint little flame that I took as a symbol and allegory of my struggle for an art in the process of extinction may continue to burn, and which ethically I must make the effort and commit the will to carry out.
Painting and the History of Universal Art encompass numerous and diverse examples of its material development. Their observation and cognitive synthesis can provide us with pretexts and starting points for our personal work. A considerable number of twentieth-century artists have done so under different circumstances. It is a powerful and analyzable fact, across the different cultures of the world, that the observing gaze tends to become impregnated with existing subjects and images, and this is also where my concept and definition of Mother Painting lies, for she is an incestuous mother, devouring her own children.
Personally, I accept it this way: nothing is pure and original in Art. It is true that the avant-gardes investigated this idea, but in my opinion there were always precedents or reminiscences of remote objects and phenomena, as conveyed to us by the most rigorous sciences of knowledge and aesthetics, historical materialism, and a certain archaeology and anthropology of knowledge. Scholarly books on this subject abound. Perhaps other conceptual forms of contemporary art have attempted to overcome such skeptical opinions of mine, but every creative attempt, more or less innovative and original, always remains included within the Spain of its time.
I no longer know how to continue extending this somewhat pedantic and pretentious discourse.
Miguel Ángel Campano “poca plata”
Madrid, March 2011
