NO Gallery

For all that has been said and done about painting, anyone who paints (i.e. studio painting) would agree that it is a pleasurable activity. Looking at something, deconstructing it in your mind, and rendering it with paint is this silent meditative activity. I’m drawn to those moments; that’s why I occasionally come back to painting sometimes.

The time spent on its labor is a priveleged time. I scrapped out time from some that I have and there’s a guilty feeling at the back of my head. Once they go public, their value is up for speculation. As such, paintings cannot escape their role as a currency that helps distribute wealth among the wealthy. That’s assuming that the work enters the market in the first place by buying it from the artist. It is a windfall income for creatives [i.e. petit-bourgeois, small-time artisan] such as myself. I wouldn’t miss the chance of earning extra income to spend on healthcare or during emergencies.

Of course, probably everyone present in the room already knows that. But it felt necessary as an intro in the exhibit text for Landscapes (the view from a bus). My painting problem was to signify painting’s role as a medium for speculative value through painting. That’s why paintings of billboards.

Advertisements facilitate the flow of goods and services (e.g. unregulated online casino apps). They don’t produce new value. Rather, they help siphon incomes and taxes upwards. They stand among rice fields; on top of what was a rice paddy. A site deemed profitable as a prime marketing spot bought for as low as how much investors can eke out for a poor farmer or a landlord looking for extra rent income.

I painted empty billboards. They are something that I find humorously tautological during bus trips. They have to advertise themselves because no one bothered renting them. They are sites that promote the value of their own visibility. That way, I think billboards and paintings have a lot in common. That’s why painting them would somehow work as an allegory of painting. Maybe what I set out to do will work or maybe it won’t if the work ends up in the stockroom. It’s all up for speculation I guess.