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Painting and the Metaphor of Discourse

The book in which the essay is published specifically focuses on relations between painting and architecture. In this context and through a discussion of the work of the German artist Thomas Scheibitz the essay explores how such a relation could be construed if, at the outset, the assumption that painting is inherently representational and architecture not, is rejected. Within such a distribution the essay employs the biological concept of autopoiesis and Deleuze’s concept of the fold to allow the interests of the artwork (rather than the observer) to structure what is written.

The wider context of this essay is a concern about the relation of abstract painting to history and how that pertains to the challenges of a creative studio practice. For certain high profile painters, writers and curators criticality is concerned with reviewing marginalised practices and with tracing alternative paths through the modernist output. However, the originality of my research is to critically examine the vocabulary and discourses through which any taxonomy or history becomes established. Through the apparatus of writing insights gained in the studio, which include moments or fragments of paintings’ past repeated and revealed involuntarily through the act of painting, are investigated.

Ultimately, this essay explores a radically non-representational relation between writing and painting; an aspiration informed by the non-representational relation between philosophy and writing that structures the work of Gilles Deleuze. Whereas recent writing about painting by Deleuzian scholars tends towards philosophical explication this essay aspires to demonstrate something of the non-representational structure of Deleuze’s philosophising. For Deleuze writing on diverse cultural practices such as painting, cinema, literature and science extended his philosophical project and with this in mind the research has significance for a philosophical as well as an art audience.