Acrylic on linen canvas mounted on wood
Spring 2010
Overall dimensions: 60 x 250 x 2,4 cm
Single panel dimensions: 3x (60 x 80 x 2,4 cm)
Three canvases aligned, three numbers answering one another.
The first speaks of bare expense, the cost of matter: linen canvas mounted on particle board, glue, gesso, acrylic, stencil films — together amounting to €75.
The second proclaims the worth of the work as a singular object: €1000, a sum set by my own hand.
The third, in a gesture of self-institution, establishes the valuation of the whole: €2700.
This tautological triptych — a painting that gives voice to its own price, asserting in the same breath its cost and its being — transcends any mere irony of economic transparency. It probes the threshold: how does an ordinary object become a work of art?
The gap between the first and the second canvas, those €925, is not accounted for in material terms but in invisible time: years of trials and errors, the memory of gestures repeated, layers of experience silently condensed into the instant of this creation. Each new painting is never truly new; it bears traces, carrying in silence the lineage of all those that came before.
The third canvas, paradoxical, acts both as judge and party. It embraces the first two while brandishing its own price. It becomes a multiplied mirror, where economy and aesthetics intertwine and echo one another. It shifts attention away from the finished surface, redirecting it towards the conceptual structure beneath. It reminds us that the work does not reside solely in its visible materiality, but in the thought that permeates it, the idea that sustains it.
And so remains a question, suspended and deliberately unresolved: can the monetary value of a work of art ever truly coincide with its artistic value? Can aesthetic quality be captured in a number, or is it destined always to elude us — fugitive, unmeasurable — between the market’s reckoning and the sensitive experience of encounter?
K.L.