Introduction to 661 Conjectures for a
New Paint Management
1989-2004
What To follows is a comprehensive set of 661 drawings that I have made over the past fifteen years and represents my thoughts on the evolution of painting: conjectures for a new paint management. I would like to apologize in advance for its seemingly encyclopedic character, it is certainly a subjective account. One may interpret this as a pamphlet, a manual, a visual dictionary or as simply an annotated inventory. I would like to ask the reader to defy the temptation (or risk, even) to view this book in that way.
I would like to suggest instead that you view it as a logbook, a tragicomic diary of sorts: an empirically driven assemblage of coalescing notions, culled from disparate sources, from comics to taxidermy to daily pictorial experiences.
I started this logbook in 1989 and it extends to the present. During this time, we have arrived to a place that lies beyond the exhaustion of late modernism. From this tired state, I created for myself a guide to navigate what I call the “The Paintant Phase in the Evolution in Painting,” or the beginning of Complex Painting. Moving forward with an alternative away from the protocols of “Post ” or “Neo” or the re-academization of painting. Searching for a model, where the past and future of painting breathes a new continuity by establishing new relationships, families, associations, and betrayals.
These paradoxical menu of names, definitions, and drawings themselves each represent a possibility for painting that does not necessarily need to be realized or implemented. In most cases they are just “unpaintable”— this is true by traditional, direct means or even by digital ones—existing only in a non-territorialized state, in groundlessness. Over time some of them have been rendered or territorialized in a variety of forms: from Enviromental Paintants, to Panel paintants, to Animation Paintants etc, and with their help I continue threading the net of possible places for painting.
Fabian Marcaccio, Paintants