My visual art practice revolves around two central themes. I would like to determine which of the two came first, but attempting to do so is dizzying—each is both the cause and the consequence of the other, much like the classic chicken-and-egg problem.
One of these themes is that of the looping structure—the paradoxical pattern I alluded to earlier. In one way or another, this principle touches on concepts such as mise en abyme, recursion, impredicativity, self-reference, vicious circles, feedback loops, inverted causality, and circular reasoning. I couldn’t say which of these mechanisms best serves my purpose. What matters is the circular, disorienting logic they produce—a system where destination and journey collapse into one another, where beginning and end switch roles.
The other theme is a desire to deconstruct art itself. More precisely, to bring to the forefront my own analysis and understanding of the field in which I operate. I aim for this deconstruction to manifest in a range of questions—often contradictory, sometimes delightfully absurd.
This dissection concerns the art object both at close range—where the focus is placed solely on the material itself, stripped of any meaning beyond its physical and chemical properties (a visual artwork being, first and foremost, a construct made of tangible elements)—and from a distance, where broader issues come into play: its definitions, identities, values, modes of presentation, mechanisms, and purposes.
The paradoxical recursion of the first theme (as I shall call it for now) is intrinsically bound up with the second: my intention to deconstruct art. In the field where I work—art—my subject is art itself. From the moment I began approaching the artwork in a strictly material way, paradoxical recursion followed naturally. To regard an artwork in concrete terms is to examine it from a distance, to reduce it to the bare essentials required for its existence, to highlight its visible components, to turn the object inwards. In short, it means abandoning representation.
Chronologically, my desire to peel back the layers of art emerged before my interest in paradoxical recursion, and appears to have triggered it. But perhaps the reverse is true. Perhaps my impulse to dissect and understand was born from an unconscious attraction to recursive paradox. And so, we’re back to where we started—at the chicken-and-egg conundrum.