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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.

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