What is contemporary painting but a contradiction? A claim before a modern prejudice? A thesis that destabilizes the comfort zone of art in the supposing democratic nature of its making and presentation? The reinforcement of traditionalist values?  Could it also be an ontological proposal that assumes a confrontation between medium and practice? A thesis that understands spectacle and experience as the creative motors of art?  It may feed off or deny the reality of mass culture supposing that there is an impossible distance between the latter and the elitist practice of art. A tension that the postmodern emphasized but left unresolved.

What happens when those contradictions are blurred? What is at stake with the intention, the execution and the experience of painting as a contemporary means of expression? The bold contradiction of high capitalist society, certainly. The ‘eyes’ of contemporary culture rotate between photography, cinema and now the virtual world. An innocent, childish, and unarticulated state of minds and things is its outcome: intellectual food for the tragic and the cynical. 

In the midst of the confusion, it is a reality that painting is no longer decorative or contemplative but is part of the ‘real-artificial’ experience. That is, perhaps, its most productive contradiction. Also because of the visual sophistication of mass media, art emerges at its interstice: in between a great panic and a great boredom, both symptomatic of the world of the posts-posts. Partly because of the exhaustion of styles or their reiterations, art exists as the synthesis and culmination of the individual whose recourses for invention are permeated by the collective unconscious, and retranslated as its own. 

This thesis is the departure point of the contemporary painter Claudia Pérez-Pavón who has along the years explored those contradictions from the genesis of painting. Through the appropriation of the visual languages of photography, cinema and virtual reality, the artist has turned to participative ways and interactions to construct her work. Seemingly, the show proposes an almost literal translation of Pérez-Pavón’s practice, based on multi-disciplinarity and experience. The project assumes the collaborative nature of the production and diffusion of art in the context of exhibition.

The serial format of most of the work is the basis through which meaning can be constructed in the space of a contemporary showroom. The use of virtual reality translated into the museum space will be integral part of the exhibition documentation and is integrated from the artistongoing investigation on light. 

Each work will be presented from a conceptual viewpoint. A concept based on the voyeuristic nature of the gaze assuming that concept in painting requires a special emphasis on form and matter; the latter also implies a particular attention on space and light. Each work will be exposed as an isolated narrative and will be treated in its formal singularity.  Videos of the documentary material that forms the core content of the work will be displayed. The museography requires the elaboration of ambience like rooms that correspond to a strategy of visual obstructions that emphasize the intimate nature of the works. The fragment being part of a totality through seriality is then integrated as totality in relation to the work at large, which in turn appears as a fragment. The key to the presentation of the work lays in a spatial and objectualgame of displacements of the gaze. 

Presenting painting in its contemporary contradiction forces the institution, the museographer-curator, and the spectator to take part in a endless exercise of translations and displacements. This way, one can create meanings and spaces that escape the comfort zone of the common place. 

virginie kastel, 2009