Thickness and surface: Towards a painterly space

ABSTRACT

The starting point of this reflection is deeply anchored in my practical work as a drawer. Knowing my work was never about illustrating space or about depicting it, I was forced to ask myself about the nature of space my drawing was creating, as a non-figurative art form. I noticed that numerous artists and critics where asking this very same question all along the twentieth century, opposing the flatness of the picture plane to a non-illusionist painterly space. I chose to extricate some of the prominent issues about space in modern painting to show the dense and multiple definitions the notion of space endured during the last century, trying to define more clearly the status of a painterly space made by shapes, layers and matters.

KEYWORDS:

• Painterly
• space
• haptic
• thickness
• surface
• depth
• illusionism