Process art, or art-in-process, is an artistic movement as well as a creative sensibility and a worldview in which the final product of art and craft—the art object—is not the main focus. Process, within process art, refers to the formation of art: searching, classifying, gathering, associating and experimenting. Art is therefore seen as a creative journey or process, rather than as a finished product.
Process art, paintings with light, tricks of optics?
Process art, or art-in-process, is an artistic movement as well as a creative sensibility and a worldview in which the final product of art and craft—the art object—is not the main focus. Process, within process art, refers to the formation of art: searching, classifying, gathering, associating and experimenting. Art is therefore seen as a creative journey or process, rather than as a finished product.
Working from the perspective of creating a work of process-based art, I seek to explore artistic methods. In the piece PaiNt a FOrest and Get LOst I have transplanted an artistic laboratory into the space of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, in order to offer a perspective on the portability of art and of art-in-process.
In this space the work has developed out of the dynamism offered by what is processual and participatory. I have gathered materials from the areas surrounding the Museum in order to bring to life the project's central idea: to paint a forest using electric light as the medium.
Painting with light, the so-called physiogram popularly known as "light painting," is a technique created in 1889, in which the trajectory of a moving light source is photographically recorded in a low-light environment.
In theory, there are several ways to paint with light: when we photograph the movement of a beam of light with the camera held at a fixed point, or when we move the camera over a fixed point of light.
In this project it is light that paints a reality using lenses (optics). Optics is understood here as the branch of physics concerned with the behavior and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the design of instruments used to detect it.
My research in the field of optics and light painting has led me to create paintings on stretched canvases where the canvas itself is almost entirely white. What I seek to project onto the whiteness of the canvas is a reality that, in the end, suggests itself as a fanciful image.
There is a painted forest, but it is not paint "per se" that paints it. It is photographic filters, lenses, mirrors and electric light that tint, on the stretcher, a miniature reality.
The artist David Hockney has speculated (together with physicist Charles M. Falco) that the advances in pictorial realism and precision in the history of Western art since the Renaissance were largely the result of optical devices as aids—such as the camera obscura, the camera lucida, and curved mirrors—to which the development of artistic technique and skill is credited. By drawing on the physics of mirrors, light and optical devices, I seek to design handmade technology, weaving it together with popular Colombian sayings such as "piNte un bOsque y piErdase." I'm interested in examining and reclaiming our popular language, reversing its meaning and portraying it literally.
The show, which opens on December 5 with a presentation on the process, will remain open until January 25, 2015.
Melissa Cruz
Visual Artist