It’s past ten in the evening, the studio bathes in that yellow light that transforms everything. My phone blinks on the table, silent notifications dancing in my peripheral vision. I should turn it off, but something holds me back. This permanent tension between screen and canvas, between digital flow and painting’s stillness. Perhaps this is where our era’s art is played out: in this friction, this resistance that the pictorial medium opposes to the dematerialization of the world.
The Screen as Painting’s New Rival
We paint in a world saturated with images. Every day, billions of pixels scroll before our eyes, creating a parallel reality more seductive, faster, more accessible than what we attempt to fix on our canvases. David Hockney sensed this as early as the seventies with his Californian pools, those blue rectangles that already anticipated our future screens. But today the question arises with new acuity: how do we paint when everything becomes flow, notification, update?
The screen promises the instantaneous, infinite correction, permanent ctrl+z. Conversely, each stroke I trace with India ink inscribes itself in the irreversible. No going back possible, no cancellation. This radicality of the pictorial gesture takes on a new dimension when faced with digital’s infinite plasticity. It becomes almost subversive.
Materiality as an Act of Resistance
This evening, before my 60x90 cm canvas, I feel this physical resistance of the paper, this friction of ink penetrating the fibers. There is something anachronistic and necessary in this gesture. Contemporary painters seem to have understood this: never has painting’s materiality been so claimed as today. Anselm Kiefer piles straw and lead onto his giant canvases, Frank Auerbach accumulates layers of paint to create sculptural reliefs. This material escalation is no coincidence.
The screen erases matter, reduces it to uniform pixels. Painting exalts it. Each impasto tells a story, each drip carries the memory of a gesture. In my work with India ink, this materiality manifests differently: in how water spreads, how black dilutes, creating those shades of gray that no screen will ever faithfully render. This is perhaps our secret victory over digital: this infinity of nuances that only the eye can grasp when facing the original.
Fertile Error Against Digital Perfection
Digital cultivates perfection, uniformity, infinite reproducibility. In painting, we cultivate the opposite: fertile accident, the unexpected, what escapes control. That unforeseen drip that radically transforms a composition, that smudge that opens a new space in the image. The screen knows no accident. It only knows error, which must be corrected, erased, optimized.
Gerhard Richter built an entire body of work on this dialectic between photographic precision and pictorial unpredictability. His squeegee works, those gestures that erase as much as they reveal, directly question our relationship to mechanical images. What remains human in the image when machines can reproduce everything? The gesture that slips, that resists, that affirms its physical presence in the world.
Suspended Time Against Permanent Acceleration
The screen imposes its rhythm: infinite scroll, permanent channel-surfing, fragmented attention. To paint is to resist this temporality. It is to create zones of slowness, spaces where time becomes dense. My nocturnal studio sessions are parentheses torn from the world’s acceleration. Time to watch ink diffuse, to let one area dry before intervening on another.
This slowness is not nostalgic. It is strategic. In a world where everything accelerates, painting offers an alternative temporality. Agnes Martin spent hours tracing her pencil lines on white canvases, creating those infinite grids that seem to suspend time. This claimed slowness becomes a political act faced with digital’s permanent urgency.
Physical Presence as Ultimate Singularity
Faced with a screen, we are always spectators. Faced with a painting, we become presence. We must move, change angle, approach to see the texture, step back to grasp the whole. This corporeality of the encounter with painted work, no digital reproduction can restore it. Perhaps this is where painting’s irreducible singularity lies: in this demand for presence it imposes.
When I paint in the evening, in this artificial light that transforms values, I don’t seek to rival the screen. I cultivate what it cannot offer: raw presence, assumed accident, the irreversible gesture. This resistance is not a rearguard battle. It is an affirmation: that despite the world’s virtualization, it remains necessary to make exist objects that resist, that impose themselves through their simple physical presence. Objects that don’t blink, don’t update, that persist in their absolute singularity.
Contemporary art doesn’t ignore the screen. It composes with it, challenges it, sometimes integrates it. But it keeps alive this fundamental intuition: that between our hands and eyes, there must always be matter, resistance, reality.
