Wise to Art

The vast majority of easel paintings in history has been executed on a rectangular surface whose proportions approximate more or less the golden number. From perfect squares to ample parallelograms, the right-angled shape is a constant.

It seems that when painting migrated from its original mural setting, the most practical surface to transpose to was the rectangle. This was obviously the most convenient shape when assembling planks or when later building frames for canvasses. This might be less evident for modern boards but tradition is strong and one can still imagine the rectangular shape as advantageous in manufacture, handling and transport. We find similar reasoning for the window in architecture where the shape was commanded by analogous pragmatic thinking. In fact, the idea of the independent painting (not fixed permanently into or unto a wall) as a window, allowing a peek into a different reality, has permeated the history of painting. The rectangular shape is of course not unique to paintings or to windows; the book has it, the computer screen, the post card, the poster, the letter-paper, the stamp. It’s a basic shape in our shaped world.

A flat and rectangular surface is thus the torrid scene on which the painter performs his magic. On this thightly delimited space he records reality, leads us into illusion; transmits impressions, passes on sentiments or simply lets his work touch us independently of intention. All these possibilities neatly sum up the subsequent stages and the chronological order that painting passed through over the last centuries. The artist’s working means are line, shadow, colour, texture, mass, contrast, shape. With these ever same ingredients he will create images that may or may not appeal to us, disturb us, pass unnoticed by us or at best fascinate us. What it is exactly that we see in a painting is often not clear to us as a whole registry of sentiments and emotions is at play.

The interesting thing is not so much the choice of the support’s geometrical shape but that of its ineluctably limited space. The practical considerations have of late gone as far as to standardizing art exhibit surface measures to fit the norms of modern day flats and apartments. The convention of framing accentuates this ongoing limitation and encircles the scenic setting yet more strongly.

From the very beginning the painter has been forced to live with limitations, on the one hand with the missing third dimension, on the other with the imposed rectangle. The history of modern painting is for a great part a history of attempts to overcome these limitations. However, there is a much more formidable constraint for the modern painter, a terrible impediment to the exercise of his art imposed by society and of such far-going consequences that the doctrine has actually put a temporary end to painting as an art form: the pretended unacceptability of returning to earlier exploits.

The false idea that evolution in art is linear has made that the ‘space of painting’, the traditional flat rectangle, has become ‘used up’. That there is no more originality to squeeze out of this vehicle has led modern artists to abandon the canvas for other ‘art’ forms.

What hasn’t been understood in the process is that, in essence, Art is forged by limitation and not by freedom. We’ll come back to this notion in another post.