To see with one’s feet.

I was walking when I found this painting. Walking in the mountains. Since then I was following it, or maybe it was the painting accompanying me and showing me the way, from a distance. Possibly painted by other wanderers, no matter who, and if time erases it, others will come and paint again. It is authorless, undated. Quietly demanding attention; it is small, yet strategically well placed. It multiplies, breaks, and disperses in the landscape, covering hundreds of kilometers; yet still demands our attention, just as the everchanging landscape remains the very same at every step. Housed on rocks and logs, often in pairs; couples who can not communicate, irremediably looking in opposite directions. Wanderers will never see them united, ever only seeing one of them at a time, depending on the wanderer’s walking direction, and never getting a direct view on both. Its presence is denied and only the constant movement leaves its trace. This is indeed a painting which is seen with one’s feet.

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A painting, favoring a frontal view above all, is a bi-dimensional format in which depth only exists as an illusion, its shallow depth hidden by its frame, thus protecting the painting’s physical reality and its vulgar structural support, denying the spectator the discovery of the painting’s representative eagerness being an illusory trap. The history of the frame and the increasingly deliberate visibility of the painting’s edge hold all of the painting’s history. The painting’s edge, its limit, place of the error, the mistake, the accidental mark; the space of the involuntary gesture, most faithful of all witnesses, and its will to conceal or reveal, talking to us about the painter’s deepest intentions.

It is exactly here, on the painting’s very edge, in this small lateral space, where everything happens.

- Irene Grau, October 2017