Ain't it Painting? · by Ivan Dal Cin

Ten years after the Aummagumma project I resume my game with brushstrokes. What was a more or less explicit reference there - Lichtenstein's brushstrokes - becomes one of the two main sources in this morpho/ontological comparison.

Lichtenstein's revival of the "brushstrokes" theme in the 1980s complicated the nature of that work: the iconic painted brushstrokes meet the printed reproductions of real ones and, above all, those physically imprinted on the surface. It is no longer just action painting that is called into question, as in the parodied version of the 1960s, but the pictorial gesture tout court between pop, hyperrealism and analytical painting.

All this is a counterpoint to the more modest observation of the nature of brushstrokes in the shodo practice: a limited set of well-defined strokes, to be executed precisely in the right order, gives rise to thousands of logograms. The purely visual nature of these signs, unlike phonetic alphabets, and the calligraphic gestures suggest a different approach to painting, extremely synthetic and analytical.