THE PICTURE PLANE AND PICTURE SPACE IN HISTORY
A piece of paper, a canvas or any flat surface is two-dimensional and without any implication of spatial dimensionality. Yet, throughout much of our history, effort has been focused on ways of depicting an illusion of three-dimensional reality on a more or less flat surface. With each time period, there were ideas in the air. Sometimes, it was religion that first explained ideas; or artists who intuited them; or scientists who analyzed and systematized. Through time, representation changed.
Earliest attempts utilized layering, placing one form in front of another, the one on top closest to the viewer. Hierarchical representation used scale to suggest importance: smaller was less significant. Eventually, more distant object were observed to be smaller than were those closer to the viewer. Think about the mountain scenes of China and of the religious paintings of the Middle Ages.
In the Renaissance, a greater focus on observation and analysis led to systemization and to the laws of perspective. Think about railroad tracks dwindling to a single point, initially frontal and then from above or below. This was a somewhat static world; the Baroque made perspective more dynamic by shifting it to the diagonal. Think about Rubens’ Christ Descending From The Cross. The Rococo meandered through space and Neoclassicism returned to layering and aligning forms in a taut severely classical space.
As science explored the nature of light, the focus shifted to surface, rather than form in a rigid and contrived space. The portrayal of deep space was more about concept that observable reality and with that change, space slowly flattened. Think about Manet, whose figures stand informally in a shallower space, and then of Monet, whose structures dissolve in pastiche of small daubs of paint.
The Impressionist’s visual world was literally coming apart. How could they pull their world together? Cezanne analyzed form into simple facets and rebuilt a world of solidity and cubes; Seurat organized the tiny dots of paint, flattening them into tight graphic arrangements of shapes that kept their reference to reality. Together, they led the way to further flattening and ironically, Cezanne’s focus on structure led to its demise.
Influenced by Cezanne’s proto-cubism, Picasso and Braque deconstructed form; they arbitrarily, synthetically, put it back together, layering to create an almost flat pictorial space in which the implication of space was almost on a molecular level.
Later, Hans Hoffmann brought the implication of movement into this constricted space by building on the observation that warm and intense colors appear to come forward and cool and dull ones retreat. He layered colored forms to create spatial possibilities that changed in context, while minutely pushing and pulling forward or backwards.
The world of classical physics is long gone now and thanks to modern physics, with its concepts of relativity, simultaneity, alternate realities, and plastic space, our concepts about how to fill or represent pictorial space have changed.
We can layer in front and behind an implied picture plane, inside the picture space. We can make forms that are ambiguously part of one structure and then part of another. We can fill a space that is all illusion or, to any extent we wish, extend it into the real world with actual forms attached to the surface. The grafting of the real to the unreal is a metaphor that speaks loudly of the world in all its current confusion and possibility.
We can even move the pictorial space into real space with installation art, its logical progenitor being set design. And the reference can be anything from an intimate space to one on a vastly grander scale. Art makes gods of all of us, however briefly and even a universe that bends and folds in on itself can become inspiration for our art.
Earliest attempts utilized layering, placing one form in front of another, the one on top closest to the viewer. Hierarchical representation used scale to suggest importance: smaller was less significant. Eventually, more distant object were observed to be smaller than were those closer to the viewer. Think about the mountain scenes of China and of the religious paintings of the Middle Ages.
In the Renaissance, a greater focus on observation and analysis led to systemization and to the laws of perspective. Think about railroad tracks dwindling to a single point, initially frontal and then from above or below. This was a somewhat static world; the Baroque made perspective more dynamic by shifting it to the diagonal. Think about Rubens’ Christ Descending From The Cross. The Rococo meandered through space and Neoclassicism returned to layering and aligning forms in a taut severely classical space.
As science explored the nature of light, the focus shifted to surface, rather than form in a rigid and contrived space. The portrayal of deep space was more about concept that observable reality and with that change, space slowly flattened. Think about Manet, whose figures stand informally in a shallower space, and then of Monet, whose structures dissolve in pastiche of small daubs of paint.
The Impressionist’s visual world was literally coming apart. How could they pull their world together? Cezanne analyzed form into simple facets and rebuilt a world of solidity and cubes; Seurat organized the tiny dots of paint, flattening them into tight graphic arrangements of shapes that kept their reference to reality. Together, they led the way to further flattening and ironically, Cezanne’s focus on structure led to its demise.
Influenced by Cezanne’s proto-cubism, Picasso and Braque deconstructed form; they arbitrarily, synthetically, put it back together, layering to create an almost flat pictorial space in which the implication of space was almost on a molecular level.
Later, Hans Hoffmann brought the implication of movement into this constricted space by building on the observation that warm and intense colors appear to come forward and cool and dull ones retreat. He layered colored forms to create spatial possibilities that changed in context, while minutely pushing and pulling forward or backwards.
The world of classical physics is long gone now and thanks to modern physics, with its concepts of relativity, simultaneity, alternate realities, and plastic space, our concepts about how to fill or represent pictorial space have changed.
We can layer in front and behind an implied picture plane, inside the picture space. We can make forms that are ambiguously part of one structure and then part of another. We can fill a space that is all illusion or, to any extent we wish, extend it into the real world with actual forms attached to the surface. The grafting of the real to the unreal is a metaphor that speaks loudly of the world in all its current confusion and possibility.
We can even move the pictorial space into real space with installation art, its logical progenitor being set design. And the reference can be anything from an intimate space to one on a vastly grander scale. Art makes gods of all of us, however briefly and even a universe that bends and folds in on itself can become inspiration for our art.
posted by Judy Schaefer at
4:54 PM
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