This paper will explore the ontological and subjective processes of creating paintings, their context and presentation and how that is imaginatively reflected in relation to the digital screen.  My intention is to discover how, through Andrew Benjamin’s notion that contemporary abstract painters transform the yet-to-be-resolved modernist painting by staging a repetition of abstraction's history, co-exists with and reflects digital representation.  This re-staging is then compared and contrasted between Clement Greenberg’s singular, media specific relation of painting to itself, with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the painter reverses the relationship between the body and a painting by overlapping the interior sense of self with the world of external objects. I will argue that contemporary abstract painting can offer a philosophical overlap of the painter’s subjectivity as a mirroring through painted materiality.  This overlapped dialogue between Greenberg’s flat painting that denies any reference to exterior representation and Benjamin’s staged exteriorized repetition is then linked through Stephen Perrella’s Hypersurface. Perella’s theory proposes a non-subjective, deterritorialised, architectural parallel of the digital as a transparent, fluid system of multi-dimensional signs in which the contemporary subject traverses.  

 

In order to co-relate these seemingly conflicting claims we need to (i) redefine Clement Greenberg’s singular definition of media specificity as a contemporary crossing-over and re-invention of the recognized art historical genres of American and European Abstract Expressionism.  (ii) To understand how Merleau-Ponty’s internal equivalent of the imaginary texture of the real is an ontological reversability of the subject and the object through the act of making.  (iii)  How this reversibility is accessed through Stephen Perrella’s architectural Hypersurface of the digital subject.  And (iv) how these correlations are re-presented in the material practices of Charlene von Heyl, Albert Oehlen, David Reed, Chris Ofili and my own work. 

 

I will demonstrate that although these artists build into their practice self-conscious strategies of dealing with paint in relation to reversible disembodiment, their (physical) application of the medium may not necessarily adhere to the surface "look" of the digital screen.  For example, unlike Reed who disguises the trace of the hand gesture through flat, painted application, Albert Oehlen and Charlene von Heyl reveal a trace of their hand by applying paint gesturally or thickly.  Although these artists appear diametrically opposed in style, they all "replicate" the clichés of Abstract Expressionism.  In this context their work could be re-framed through projected imagination in relation to the screen which, I will suggest, changes the body’s sensuous relation to time and space and is central to contemporary painting’s criticality.