Daniel Sturgis: Reasonably Relaxed

This is the publication of a paper presented at the conference “And painting? Questioning Contemporary Painting” in 2011, at the Research Centre for Fine Arts (Cieba)3 and at the FCT4.

In the last decade, the vast and heterogeneous international scene of contemporary art has staged several exhibitions and publications that show a renewed interest on painting, as if in opposition to the (larger or smaller) eclipse of this art form, which has also been evident in similar contexts.

Inevitably, questions burst from this underlying contradiction: Does painting keep posing its own questions that legitimize its continued need? Or is its persistence essentially due to market reasons, any of its cutting-edge function being lost after all? How does contemporary painting speak, and what does it speak about?

The challenge addressed to artists and researchers proposes a wide framework of questions about painting as an apparently specific ground in contemporary art and aims to sketch some possibilities of deepening and answer. Thus, for such a purpose, the diversity of topics can focus, for instance, on: the need for painting; the persistence of tradition, history or abstraction versus ruptures and mutations; the expansion of quotation and appropriation; the questioning of form and spatiality; the interaction with the photographic, the digital and the relation with image; the possibility as transitive device; the transversal and hybrid condition or specificity; the performative dimension and the experience of painting; the importance and multiplicity of narratives (history, society, identity, etc.).

But beyond these interrogations that cross the present scene and that can be summarized as “Why painting today?” we intend to put another question:

How to think the possible mystery of painting now?

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