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 in a row, three figures that speak to one another. The first records the amount spent on its material fabrication: linen canvas mounted on chipboard, glue, gesso, acrylic paint, stencil films – a total of €75. The second asserts the painting’s value as an artistic object: €1,000, a figure determined by myself. The third, in a gesture of self-legitimation, sets the valuation of the whole: €2,700.
This tautological device – a painting that states its own price, and thus its own being – is more than a mere play at economic transparency. It questions what transforms an ordinary object into a work of art. The difference between the first and the second canvas, €925, does not stem from additional materials but from an invisible accumulation: time, experience, years of practice, past attempts embodied in the present act of making. Every new work condenses a past; it carries, silently, all those that have preceded it.
The third canvas plays a paradoxical role: judge and participant at once, it arbitrates and subsumes the first two while also displaying its own price. It acts like a hall of mirrors, where economy and aesthetics endlessly reflect one another. In doing so, it shifts attention away from the finished object towards the intellectual construction that underpins it, revealing that a work of art is never confined to its visible materiality but to the thought that runs through it.
What remains is the unresolved question: can the financial value of a work of art truly correspond to its artistic worth? Can aesthetic quality be measured in numbers, or is it destined always to escape, elusive, somewhere between the market and lived experience?