My understanding of what the term “Contemporary Painting” entails

Unlike the desperate search for novelty and originality that was the currency of the past century, painters nowadays do not need to search for novel techniques or styles. There are hundreds of new and creative painting techniques available online and artists who make use of them will probably not become the important names of this generation.  simply because we are now over this need. This attitude does not correspond to the spirit of our time. We, as painters, can choose whether we want to make use of new techniques or not, but that should not be the goal of our work if we intend to be part of the contemporary dialogue.

A couple of years ago I wrote a text titled “Dense atemporality” – which I now revisit - in which I dealt with my understanding of what is implied or is expected to be present when one refers to “Contemporary Painting.”

The 20^th Century changed drastically our perception of ourselves in the world in many spheres of knowledge, with the advents of the theory of relativity, Freud’s findings about the subconscious, and Picasso’s perceptions in art, just to name a few. However, towards the end of that century, another major change took place, and it would have a strong impact on the world we live in now.

From the 80s on, personal computers became a common tool in our society. Never before had we had so much of global human history at our fingertips with such ease. My generation grew up in the world of the Encyclopedia, where we cherished the idea that there was a limited knowledge about the world, and that this knowledge could be contained in a series of books, which could be obtained by the reader. The Encyclopedia fed our hopes to know everything that there was to know about anything. The creation of the personal computers shattered that idea in pieces. The sheer amount of information stored in a computer HD is enormous, and I don’t believe anybody has the slightest hope to acquire it all. There is always far more information than we can learn or cope with. We can only have access to a tiny share of what is available to us.

And with this, we suddenly found ourselves overwhelmed by how much information we had created and how much we had discovered. We began to realize that we have so much on our plates we are simply unable to process it all, as some pieces will always be left behind. The awareness that there is always more than what we can grasp is what characterizes the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment.

When I think of contemporary art, in general terms, I think of an art that is taking this realization under consideration. And when I think about contemporary painting particularly, I imagine painters who have the whole history of painting at their fingertips, and are widely aware of it.

What is key to the moment is that, whatever we decide to do, we have a lot to digest in the process. Past and present are equally available to us and this is the first time we experience this in the recent Western history. That is why we live in an atemporary time, that is dense with surplus of information.