Observations On The Nature of Perception

Triangulation Series #25-- oil on linen, 60 x 37 inches, 2009

My work Triangulation Series 2006-08 expands on questions dealing with perspectives synthesizing concepts of pictorial space and infinity:  something I have worked on over the years.  I have allowed painterly abstraction/plasticity to express both in form and content a kind of art that goes beyond a material world of signs; my paintings reach for the infinite—the mystery and the poetry in every man’s individual drama.  I choose the golden ratio 1 = 1618 as a consistent format for nonobjective abstraction which is clearly inherent of infinite congruency [a manifestation common to all known perspective methodologies], to breakdown a dialogue on the fluidity of the vehicle of painting and its geometry.  At the same time, I establish a triangulation of the bare plane of the canvas which reaffirms its paradoxical nature as an object: where the fictitious flatness of the plane plays in suspension with the illusory spatial depth of forms expressed on it.   Though immersed in 20^th-century aesthetics, I neither strive for a specific historical movement nor for the postmodernist agenda.  Simply, I look at making art as a “fleshy” product of human experiencing, a resultant of the maker’s own passion.  Just as the idiosyncrasy of an individual, indivisible in nature, is blind to causality, an aesthetic frame embraces all its senses and the image is only the result or residue.

Non-objective, timeless, or even existential—in this sense—the image or Kunstgegenstand proposes not to explain what the meaning of experience is; rather, the image manifests itself, provoking interpretation from the observer.

There are no outside sources nor preconceived notions of the final composition.  Gesturally and intuitively, I use the plane of the canvas as an active platform (in other words, a conversation, so to speak, takes place among the paint, the canvas and me as I apply paint onto the canvas.)  In variegated densities, layer after layer—transparent or textural—the work transforms itself gradually by spectral accruement.  In continuous dialogue, I work on several pieces at the same time so all are able to inform the other.  An inner rhythm from each composition thus unfolds and guides the shifts and the construction of forms: burials, resurrections, exaltations, veilings, reattainments—all thanks to the gritty and sumptuous nature of the medium; a moodiness arises from the interlocutors with its acrid qualities of dissonance and complementary transparency. Indeed, it is color, as texture that establishes the emotional landscape of each piece.  The finished work stands on its own as a concentration of multiple layers; each of the numerous strata is essential to the completeness.  There is a sense of multidirectional movement in each of the works that acts on the viewer’s eye as he/she glances over the delineated shapes and peers through the entanglements of strokes and arabesques.  The viewer comes away, I hope, with the sense of the works’ generative completeness of a universe making and remaking itself.

As I said at the beginning, I embrace in my love of art a sense of universality; I do this not for my own self-fulfillment, but for the cosmic order and interconnectedness in our own awareness of humanity, the unifying mode from all masters.  As such, I am perennially emerging as I wander around in my space of today’s uncertain and leaderless being, where authority is seemingly derived from conflicting, and confusing powers of disbelief.  Freedom has come to us but its ethers and incongruities make us stagger.

Ricardo Morin [1]

Artist Website

December 8, 2008

[1] Edited by Billy Bussell Thompson, Professor Emeritus

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