My performative painting practice explores the interactions between the body movement and the calligraphic brushstroke to compose a pictorial narrative within an architectural and scenic space.  I search to extend the fluidity, architectural structure and kinesthetics of calligraphic brushstrokes to the body moving in an architectural and scenic space.  I use intuitive and spontaneous gestures to create a gestural narrative, inspired largely by running script and chirashi-gaki calligraphy, graffiti, cave paintings, dance improvisation, ballet, and gestural abstraction. 

 

Why is there a need for a painting to be presented within the boundaries of a frame? For the creators of the Nasca lines, they may find the phenomenon of putting a painting inside an Albertian’s window frame somewhat strange.  I am interested in a type of painting that can allow the viewer to wander throughout the space, like the way our eyes wander when we are walking in a forest.

 

My interest in the picture frame and performative painting has led me to take a more in depth look at how the Italian proscenium stage or “picture frame” stage was inspired by the Albertian window and how modern and postmodern developments in the scenic space have disrupted the picture frame stage, from Adolphe Appia’s departure from the bidimensional perspectival scenery to a three dimensional modular scenery, to the rotation of the horizontal plane as seen in Trisha Brown’s vertical dance plane, to the destruction of the fourth wall through audience-performer interactions in Tino Sehgal’s work.

 

According to Arnold Aronson, “the history of scenography in its simplest terms can be described as a pendulum swinging between space and image.” (1) Then, I would like to point out that painting has also become more scenographic in a modern and post-modern sense, that is, a departure from the picture frame, from Daniel Buren’s expansion of the pictorial space onto the architectural plane to Katarina Grosse’s questioning of a painting’s flatness through the mise en scène of three dimensional structures in a spatial field, and their transformation using color.   

 

In my new painting Purple Swan (2022), I would like to put forth a different idea in painting called the tableau scénique. It would operate in the reverse sense of Diderot’s “tableau vivant,” where the staging of a scene imitates a pictorial representation. The tableau scénique would have performative or scenographic elements, or both, it is thus a type of painting, where a pictorial narrative operates in the logic of a mise en scène of performative painting. The scenic space integrates the architectural space and scenic interventions using a post-Appian approach, allowing for freedom of movement of the calligraphic brushstroke in a three dimensional space, beyond the canvas frame. 

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1. ARONSON Arnold, « The Future of Scenography », Theater Design & Technology, Vol. 46 No. 1 (Winter 10), p. 84.

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