I'd welcome feedback on this note, text to a body of work

Post-contemporary Modernism
mapping the subliminal
2002-2012


Pop culture is a way of seeing; biofeedback, emoreaction, sensations,
all of which hint at a vocabulary of shape, color, texture… at this point things get a little sticky.

In a McLuhan-like glance at the ability of the medium to be a message,
our feedback describe a response, but there must be a language since we have a description.

It is possible that thoughts, ideas, concepts, are semantic constructions which can exists just as easely
in non-verbal, non-intellectual systems where shades, depth, angle and illumination describe complex meanings,
serve as a vocabulary for a language of sight as complex as the language of speech, currently our predominant intellectual tool.

Could there be a grammar of sensations, even going further can we have a dictionary of abstract symbols?
It's the brain vs mind conundrum. A visual art concept depends on a material substrate such as colors, paint,
but when these are altered, shaped by body language and unconscious directives,
new images and new concepts emerge that did not exist in the artist's mind prior to production.

"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state."

—Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

Art is closer to psychology; we can approach it like a science, at least in how we think of it,
but the making of art remains, well… an art rather than a science.

Ideas seek to shape matter, whose resistance informs and alters the idea (towards an ideal)
leading to an adaptation better suited to the physical limitations of matter;
what then emerges is a third element, something unexpected, something new.

In this work I wanted to deal with unknowns, specifically to cast beyond conscious expectations,
assuming I would discover the unseen and unpredicted when selecting images chosen by feelings and intuition.
As we enter a realm of grammatical contradiction we're forced to a higher level of interpretation;
now we no longer read a personal story so much as get a feel of the culture within which this work was made.

In these paintings language is the primary concern, exploring how formal elements create a style
which then influences and directs the contextual reading of the work.

http://www.mikloslegrady.com/paintings/modernism/statement.html