It's fucking impossible to see a painting through digital pictures. I mean see it. Of course one can look - Satan knows we all love to look - directing the optic nerves towards pixels with no place, a non-spatial direction without orientation. The screen is a vacuum that sucks out the marrow of our experience. All these megapixels and RGB quilts are no less real but so much less really here, have no presence, so smell or touch. We are living in a culture of lookers who do not see because everyone is trying to get outside of themselves, an absurd notion, so as not to face their own faces, to see their selves selving I's eyeing their own sights. And now I am sitting here looking at this shimmering pixel grid relaying a facsimile of what appears to be a painting, so what am I to do with that? Do I talk about what I'm seeing or what I think I'm seeing or what I think you are seeing or what I think you want me to see compared to what can actually be seen or what I suspect others would see if they were seeing the thing itself rather than the flickering binaries or how I am seeing this thing-that-is-no-thing on the particular screen I happen to be viewing it on/in/though now, at this moment, at this place (which is to say, should I attempt to ground this groundless experience within a ground of my own fundament)?

That needed to be said in order for me to say anything. I haven't seen these paintings so I can only look at them. Having said that, let me say a little something about 'saying', concerning speaking, speaking to the capacities of painting's concerns. Being a painter myself, or at least having gone through the gauntlet to be trained as one, I think that talking about painting is fucking shitty. No, it's not stupid - on the contrary it can be morbidly intellectual - and it's not absurd - part of the problem - and it's not useless - which is the crux of the issue. Let me unpack this a little more and contextualize it within my own persona: [in my opinion] a critical language focused upon the medium of painting is disastrously inappropriate, negligent to the inherent potentials of the medium (and its conductor) to transcend reasonable language into higher platitudes of holistic considerations. Its painfully rigorous mechanisms apply a scaffolding to the organic sensual movements, to encapsulate them into an architecture of emotions, devastating the very affect the words attempt to defend, much as the looming American skyscrapers stand as pillars of our own cosmic idiocy within a disapproving natural ecology of sentience. Thirdly, applying a language to painting renders it pragmatic, makes it serve a function, injects it with usefulness, and I assert that painting should be anything but useful. Whatever it is, painting must be definitively useless, "purposelessly purposive" as that old moldy-tongued Mr. Kant would squeal, which is to say that our relationship to its nuanced contours should not be compacted into a logical algorithm that calculates any definitive sense. As a window or a portal or a mirror or a parallax labyrinth of sensuous slippage (or whatever allegory the painter chooses to apply to their own creations in order to continue grasping for their own aspirations), the painting is a thing actively transcending its own materiality, a thing which points away from itself, a concrete excretion of pure immanence, an allegory for the 'which for which there is no whicher.'

At least ideally, to the extent that you are interested in idealism. Perhaps you consider yourself more of a realist, and to that extent apply a firm semiotics to your works, and if so I have this to say to you: you're doing it all wrong. So, you've made some paintings. What do you want from me? Some words, some directions, some advice, some feedback, some poetry? Here's what I've got:

What I can see is that there's not much to see. I can't see anything, any things, or at least any thing that I can recognize. There are no images in your marks, only marks, only paint, so I look closer to see into them. These are definitely paintings because I can see that they are made of paint, they do not hide from that, there is no illusion, it seems to be a fact I can take for granted. What are the qualities of these marks? In fact they appear less and less as marks, more as patches, pools, swatches of uniform color distinguishing one from the other, concentrations of chroma comparing their shades and tints. There is texture - there is always texture - which appears exaggerated, amplified, building up peaks so high that I cannot see over them and must confront their edges directly. Even the support has texture, so what is the difference between the coarseness that you are painting upon and the impasto you are applying? I have many questions which you are not present to attend to: What are these colors and where do they come from? All I see is paint, so what is this paint of? These forms defy defining, so how are they derived? What's the difference between applying mineral pigments to the meat of a plant, or the hairs of an animal? How does the wall support your vision differently than the floor? Where are you in space-time? At what speed do you move? How do you look when you are painting, and how does this compare to how you look when you are not? How do you begin, and how do you end, and do you know it or feel it, and how do you reconcile the insolubility of these human mechanisms to such absurd notions as "abstraction" or "provisional action" or "tactile vision?"

It's a shame that we couldn't have a conversation "in the flesh" concerning your work as I would very much like to hear your response to these questions. Perhaps we will have an opportunity in the winter. I hope this text serves you somehow, at least as a distraction to your own ambitions and affects, for awhile. Of course, all of this is completely useless, as it should be, unless you decide to put it to use, which is another conversation.

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