Paintings for Closed Eyes

Arakawa

Oct 19 – Nov 9, 1990

Arakawa

At War (Who or What Is This?), 1990

Description

The philosopher Hans-George Gadamer on the recent works of Arakawa:

An artist who sees spaces, walls and rooms as paintings and who sees paintings as walls and floors transforms the usual constancies of orientation into a strange-enticing game – a game of continually thinking out.

One viewing this from afar, caught within the narrow confines of reproductions, can only begin to divine all that will get going there, what has been erected and spread out there.

It is a uniquely astounding event and it prods me to remember the verses of Paul Celan:

There are still songs to sing beyond the human being.

What comes next are paintings for closed eyes. No revolution in the visual could be more severe. Only by means of a precise (into nowhere) ordering of its blanks could a painting be made to survive the closing of the eyes.

Let the revolution begin.