The stutter of recognition: re-visioning the baroque in contemporary painting

The major theme that runs throughout my work has always been the question of representation; where to draw the line between ‘real life’ and ‘art’, illusion and abstraction, transcription and composition. The line between illusion and truth, or to put it another way, “between the ontological and the epistemological – between ‘things as they are’ and ‘things as they seem”, was also a concern that preoccupied the seventeenth century. This research challenges the assumption that the ancients are fixed firmly and stably in a past in which the moderns are the victors and the ancients the losers. This research reconsiders the contribution the Baroque has made to Western thought, but in particular, to explain its ongoing appeal and its continuing relevance to painting in the late twentieth / early twenty-first centuries. And more importantly for the purposes of my own research as a painter in the digital age, is to pose the question: how to formulate a Neo-Baroque aesthetic adequate to addressing the problems and uncertainties specific to painting in the twenty-first century?