The term inscape conveys some notion of
representing the artist's psyche as a kind of interior landscape.
According to Professor Claude Cernuschi, Roberto Matta's use of the
term inscape for a series of landscape-like abstract or surrealist
paintings reflects "the psychoanalytic view of the mind as a
three-dimensional space: the 'inscape'. The term inscape was later
taken up by the leading Australian surrealist James Gleeson. American
abstract artists such as James Brooks, Jane Frank, and Mary Frank and
even a group of British fantasy artists founded by Brigid Marlin in
1961 and calling themselves the 'Inscape Group'.
The
word "inscape" is sometimes used, perhaps with a bit of poetic license,
to refer to the domain of interior design, suggesting that the interior
of a house or building is a kind of interior landscape, a counterpart
to the landscape surrounding the structure. It could be, however, that
this use of the term is intended as a double-entendre, evoking those
other meanings of "inscape".
Gerard Manley Hopkins, the
British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest, derived the concept of
inscape from the mediaeval philosopher, Duns Scotus. The term itself
means the unique, distinctive and inherent quality of a thing. Hopkins
believed that everything in the world was characterized by inscape and
in turn inscape was what designed an individual's dynamic, never
static, identity. Because humans are the most highly selved in the
world, we can recognize the inscape in other beings of the world
through a process called instress, says Hopkins; and to recognize a
being's inscape through instress requires a divine intervention.
Inscape and instress play a major part in organizing the structure of
Hopkins' poetry.
Wikipedia
More
than the artworks of a museum, I enjoy the museum experience. Not only
the learning experience, but the autocontemplation experience. It seems
like every part of my being is confronted, questioned and moved. I can
feel the weight of humanity, history, politics, sex, symbols, ideals
and desires on my shoulders. I find myself reflecting on existentialist
issues as well as on the simplest everyday thing.
Inside the
walls of a museum, every part of my existence becomes an artwork
subject to be contemplated. My works are an attempt to highlight the
triggers of this phenomenon of self reflection which also occurs in
sacred places of different religions. Churches of every religion also
appeal and represent this personal temple where there is positive and
negative, structures of thought. By creating empty spaces, these places
represent a presence and sometimes this irrepresentable becomes, in
fact, the awareness of the Self.
The erosion of the feeling of
belonging to a “succession of generations rooted in the past and
prolonged to the future” is the one that characterizes and generates
contemporary narcissist painting worried mainly about the Self.
Narcissism is the answer to the unconscious challenge of finding one’s
self. The Self is se precipitated to an endless labour of liberation,
observation and interpretation.
Plinio Avila
Representation
has been emptied from its classic content because reality is outside
the circuit due to the use of photographical representative models.
‘Abandonment of the real to a hyperrealist circularity, in the
exaggeration of the making, the representation instituted historically
as a humanist space, is metamorphosed in situ in a cold machinal
dispositive, losing any human scale by the amplifications and
accentuations of forms and color: not transgressed or overcome, the
order of representation is somehow abandoned by the perfection of
execution.
Lipovetsky
Then why painting and not photography?
With
the lack of theory for contemporary painting, realistic painting is
installed nowadays as a kind of obsolete obsession unless it is
approached from the inner perspective of the spectator and made to be
experienced. I paint because there is still a little left in our
imaginary as ‘educated’ spectators (/viewers) of art, of a metaphysical
expectation before the painted surface. A desire many times unsatisfied
by many paintings that, paradoxically, only painting can revive
continuously.
Contemporary culture has educated us to a specific
schemata of consumption of images, to a filter of appreciation even in
the most advanced spheres of art followers. These images in photography
will not make the spectator relate to them anymore than a visual frame
related to a specific place and time. The contemplation takes place in
the unfinished.
Mental images flourish from the empty painted
image. There is not much to see in these paintings, but there are much
more to see about yourself on them or through them. It makes more sense
to present an image that more than ‘signifying’, it ‘reminds’.
The
lack of last touch that separate these paintings from photographs is
exactly what seems to make the spectator participate, by relating this
awkward gap to that unfulfilled metaphysical desire. A desire that no
image can satisfy. Only the reflection on it or by it.
Plinio Avila
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