Painting almost died in the '90s and came back
as a powerful, fresh medium for a new generation of artists.
we asked a successful young belgian painter based
in new york about this explosive rebirth
and if there's such a thing as a painter's brain
OLIVIER ZAHM - There's been a massive comeback of painting over the past decade. There are paintings everywhere today. For a moment there, it was dying…
HAROLD ANCART - Considered dead, even.
OLIVIER ZAHM - Exactly. And artists were deconstructing painting, using painting as a reference, but not actually painting as such.
HAROLD ANCART - Yeah. Like Daniel Buren with BMPT [a Paris-based art group made up of Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni].
OLIVIER ZAHM - That's it. That was some serious deconstruction, using the instrument of the painter as the final stage of painting. Whatever happened?
HAROLD ANCART - I'm not a historian, but I guess that compared with the history of painting, from the caveman till today, this little death of painting is not significant at all. There's always been a massive fascination with painting. And this death of painting lasted for maybe 10 to 15 years, at most. If we want to talk about the history of painting - or the history of art in general - painters have dealt with the same challenges from the very beginning until today. There are a lot of classifications, but that's the job of the historian. The historian cannot be a historian if they don't make classifications - basically inventing drawers in which to put things.
OLIVIER ZAHM - So, for you, the conditions haven't changed for the painter…
HAROLD ANCART - The conditions have changed, of course, and the medium has changed a little. But people are dealing with the exact same problems.
OLIVIER ZAHM - Painting hasn't changed much, technically speaking.
HAROLD ANCART - I don't think so. What happened - and this is my personal point of view - is that very few things can be considered as significant shifts within the entire history of painting. There are actually two significant developments. One is the understanding of perspective and the capacity for painters to create the illusion of depth, though this is not primarily a painter's discovery. It's linked to mathematics, geometry, and a natural evolution of the understanding of the world that surrounded mankind at that time. So perspective has nothing to do with painting itself. Painting itself was always the same thing. The other change was that at some point painting became abstract… The deconstruction of painting happened after abstraction - as a consequence, probably, of breaking it down to its most elementary stage. BMPT members did not consider themselves painters. I believe they wanted to demystify painting. They were not interested in the illusion that a painting can be, which is interesting.