ART AS A FORM OF THINKING
In his treatise on painting (Codex urbinas latinus 1270), Leonardo da Vinci gives the
following advice to painters: "Do not despite my opinion, when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud,
or like things, in which, if you consider them well, you will find really marvelous
ideas."
The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of
battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things,
such as devils and similar creations, which may bring you honor, because the mind is
stimulated to new inventions by obscure things. (1956-51)
It is remarkable that Leonardo places so much weight on the mind and ideas of the
painter. The image we receive his treatise on painting differs widely from the more
romantic image of the artist that is still prevalent in the twentieth century. For
Leonardo, painting is not an expressive, intuitive, sensuous, or emotional practice but,
above all, an intellectual one. The painter thinks, discovers, and invents.
ART is still an issue of interest for a wide community of every level of interest also
because of the complicity of dynamics standing between causes and effects to originate
artistic practice.
Great art can speak across time because of this multiple layers of
strong structure of ideas standing behind of itself.
Artistic education and production are a result of continuous interactions of inputs of
different disciplines, practice, knowledge, and comparisons with different artists and
thinkers about the subject. The theoretical, historical, and environmental interest of artists is an
issue of long life term question. Mastery only on a specific subject regarding artistic
practice as art histories, art theories, color theories, visual perception theories, etc.
would not be sufficient to produce art by itself. The process is made in combination with
these notions and by the transformation of inputs in another form of expression.
A very basic gap between artistic practice and art theory/history is in their material
and abstract reality. There can be two defendable, contra dictionary theoretical or
historical “fact” regarding a subject or a specific artwork, but only one artistic object
in its material being. Who is interested in art needs to have the flexibility to deal with
this fact.
After ‘cultural turn”, these last three decades, art history discipline is busy to elaborate
on its traditional approach to bringing itself to a higher arguable level in
multidisciplinary and global context. We are conscious of the impossibility to catch
‘historical fact’ and uselessness of a self-referential, narrative expression of the
previous experiences.
My artistic research is about the “structure” notion in art and with a theoretical basis wants
to refer to the structural interpretation of an artwork. The visual examples of this research
want to communicate this timeless information through another construction.
My visual sample deals with historical artwork, such as Velazquez’s “Las Meninas”,
in order to illuminate the artist’s original ideas for a contemporary audience. It is not
an aesthetical reinterpretation of the original but a theoretical examination, which in
this case refers to Faucoult’s essay “Las Meninas”*.
Using digital manipulation and time-based media such as animation and video, I
examine “Las Meninas” through a structural narrative; in taking the original work,
digitally editing it and transplanting it into other media, I examine whether the
masterpiece is in the object/technique or in the idea. Using a new narration to
underline principle structural notions of the painting as time, space, and juxtaposition
of these qualities.
With my visual production, art is conceived as a medium by itself and as a territory of
interaction theory and practice to achieve multiple access and to relate larger
audiences with internal structure and the idea standing behind other artwork or other
period. And the rule of the artist as a thinker and traveler in the obscure and rhizomatic
roods of Art.