PAINT-ID (2009)

The exhibition “Paint-id” is a presentation of young and emerging artists in Greece focusing on current trends in painting. It comments on recent international developments in both a curatorial and theoretical level concerning the 'return' of the painting medium. Posed from this specific point of view a parallel reading of contemporary art production in Greece is suggested within an international framework. Images which are produced today by means of the painting-medium constitute an individual, definitely non-hegemonic category, a 'sub-species' of image together with the technologically produced photographic, cinema, or digital image, the other very many 'spatial' images, such as those in installation art, in architecture, in the theatre, and dance, or the 'pictographic images' of a music score or a text of poetry. All these, including painting, continue to attempt to give a reply to the question of how meaning is produced through them, and what is the significance of the visual today. The question about painting today comes at a moment in history when traditional philosophical 'aporias' are no longer put forward only as linguistic problems and queries about theories of knowledge, but as visual enigmas (visual turn). Through this exhibition, the following questions are posed: how far is the contemporary work of painting a comment on the historically determined relation between the image and the society that produces it? And how far is the painted image a space for re-thinking of contemporary visual culture in general? Can painting still articulate conceptual thinking in connection with major anthropological constituents or even current political issues? In this way, the title 'Paint-id' should be read as a question about the tabula rasa of painting, both as 'identity' and as 'Id', as we call, by an idiosyncratic of terminology, the psychoanalytically defined, ontological unconscious infrastructure of what we call the 'image', that sui generis entity which moves in the conceptual complex between subjective and collective, between imaginary and reasoned reality.