After being very unhappy with my previous works lately, I began thinking that it is about time to consider a new style. But as long as I will ultimately search for a new method, there are two main principles that float boundlessly in front of me as I try to reach and take hold of it.
My works of the past feature a struggle to intensify the complexes of my thought whenever I design my letterforms. For about 6 years of trying to master the letterform to present its elegance, it is in need now to expand those ideas and skills into something that I would like to "break down." I would like to exhibit a "collapse" in what I have done. Not in the sense of recklessly abandoning the beauty of the letterform, but within the consideration of succeeding it and also retaining structure. And insofar as this will be produced, the structure will be recognized by all means.
The strokes and extensions from the form of my past works that "move" across the canvas or surface is something that I will always have an admiration of. It is a principle that will remain with me since I began reading the Futurist Manifesto by F.T. Marinetti. It is a principle of producing the feeling of movement in an artwork where a painter should not draw a horse with four legs, but with twenty. That is, the Futurists believed explicitly that art should express the ever-changing and increasing development of technology and culture, and thus art should express the beauty of speed.
This maxim, "art should express the beauty of speed," has burned into my memory. I felt in need, with intellectual hunger, to understand this sentence. What did they mean by this? How can a painting express movement?
Before I discovered this maxim, I have read Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. It is a tremendous work of the existential philosophy published in 1943. In this philosophical work, he concluded that there are contradictions in our consciousness flowing all through it. An example can be given by thinking about your past. During the time of your thoughts at some present in your distant past, you have changed through the passage of time from your past to the present, however at the same time you have not changed. In fact, in Sartre's language, I am what I am not, and I am not what I am. In addition, by having these psychological contradictions in our consciousness, there is bound to be two valid ways of thinking about reality. Likewise, this will hold true for many other practical cases, but this discussion exceed my reflections at present.
From this, Sartre's thinking introduced me to the "new psychology" (in the early 20th century) at the time. This psychology is commonly known as Gestalt. During my interest, the Gestaltists have discovered different ways of perceiving phenomena which hold true and that also challenge our perceptions. A simple example is the principle of closure. Given a triangle with the squared space overlapping the center of it, our minds "close" the shape, however the real form is simply the three corners of the triangle where the three connecting lines cannot be seen (or is it?).
In painting I have found that it is quite similar. When we try to express movement, our minds constitute in "giving" it motion. The movement of our eyes following a consistent basis on a painting gives us an impression that "something is moving." The increments of width in a structure make it seem like it is growing like a flower blooming with great violence. The illusion of twisting structures going vertically downward may seem like two airplanes falling and struggling to free themselves as they are somehow entangled. I therefore believed that line is the great foundation for expressing movement. They hold the foundation of the strict one-to-one correspondence with our mind via our eyes. This made me understand what path I will take. And that is a much more psychological and analytical kind of art-form that will have its strength on the beauty of line and its weakness from the minimalism of color.
This realization completed the puzzle of an old influence I have had before this discovery. The paintings of my friend and teacher, Ramón Alejandro, have given me a great knowledge which I credit him with great merit. He is one of those painters who try to exceed perfection by exhausting the necessary psychological appeal of the form of an object. That is, it is the importance of the exaggeration and distortion of form and color of an object and achieving structural brilliance by complicating the form and yet retaining a simplified coloration when necessary. For brevity, a strong internal structure and a simplified color scheme given as a property of an object achieves power in impression. I also follow him strongly that extreme detail can only be used when it is necessary. What are the strongest points in a painting? What is its weakest?
There are two major factors in comprehending my own theoretical thinking:
1) Movement, by using the principles of Gestalt
2) An emphasis of the relationships with lines of an object and how it functions with others, by analyzing the composition.
The new art will be the analysis of line and the structure from the connections of these lines. Wherever there is a possibility for movement, there is a strong breaking-point or dependency for exaggeration. Color disguises the true structure underneath the nature of the form but it will be negated under special circumstances which it portrays, which are comparison as to whether one thing is more special than the other. In some sense it may be symbolic, and in others it may be to the playfulness of the contrast between line and color.
