ARS POETICA

The 20th century was the era of dilettantes, amateurs, and untrained artists. The surprise, decay, deception, and victory of destruction. Art, primarily the big three of the visual arts, and even some parts of architecture, became philosophical decoration. Picasso has a great responsibility. After the posthumous success of the untrained but sometimes undeniably brilliant amateurs, he is the first truly trained person (artist) to simulate conscious incompetence. And he laughs in our faces. Star-making and art management then elevated the incompetence of the untrained to the Mauritius stamp of the financial world. Wealthy buyers buy not pictures but signatures, as Van Meegeren predicted at the beginning of the century.

I have been fighting fashion trends for 45 years, now I know that the objective, Rorschach-associated art, with which I struggled for so long, is dead. For a human being, a human being is more beautiful and meaningful than the most refined combinations of forms, colors, and fractures. More subconscious abstractions are seen on the human face than in the most imaginative, most stunning, or naively instinctive performance.

I sit in the studio in front of the larger easel. The slightly bent plate arch stretches around the viewing room like a parabolic mirror. From the dark base, female faces appear as if in my dreams. In the picture now everything builds unconsciously and without me, it feels as if I'm copying an infinitely existing, repeatedly seen work. With my thumb I gently erase the paint on the woman's face, the harsh lines soften into the deep brown base.

What I paint now is good because it shows something that can not be communicated with words or conceptual thinking. At this point, I feel as if they hold my hand. I'm just the postman who brought the message. My dreams, the movies that flicker in me, the emerging suspicions, the feelings that are coded as stories, all are just messages. Nuntiat alicui, aliquid. Message from someone, something

2008 by Robert Wegenast