A.3 | EP.8 | Working Frameworks

(Language as Matter)

Painting between nature and artifice. Pigment, resin, wax, bodily discipline, and sensory perception as material conditions of knowledge. The limits of language in accounting for what emerges through making and experience.

(participant)

Janina Picard & James Little

(Organization)

Petzel Gallery

(Master Shot)

AROUND LA AND OJAI - MONTAGE

(A)

EXT - FOLIAGE - GOLDEN HOUR

JANINA PICARD reaches into dense green foliage. Her fingers select a leaf and pull it free. The movement is deliberate, its duration determined by the resistance of the material. The leaf bends, separates from its stem, and remains between her fingers.

(B)

EXT - FOLIAGE - GOLDEN HOUR

JANINA tears the leaf and brings it toward her face. She inhales. The camera holds on the movement of her hands and the brief interval between tearing and smelling. A sequence of physical decisions, learned and instinctive, unfolds without explanation.

(c)

EXT - SUNSET HORIZON - EVENING

JANINA looks toward the setting sun. The horizon divides the composition into two fields of changing color. Her figure remains nearly motionless as the light diminishes. The camera records a duration that neither the body nor the landscape can independently determine.

(Film Abstract)

I went to see James Little in Brooklyn expecting to continue a conversation about spirituality and art. Instead, I found myself considering the distinction between nature and artifice, and whether that distinction remains meaningful in painting. Little described abstraction as a kind of public service, capable of stabilizing perception rather than simply expressing individual experience. His paintings are constructed through exacting relationships between pigment, resin, wax, color, and surface. Their material conditions are neither natural nor artificial in any uncomplicated sense. They emerge from processes in which physical properties, accumulated knowledge, and deliberate decisions become inseparable.

Cut to Janina Picard in Ojai. The dry air, vegetation, and changing light establish another set of material conditions. She performs a sequence of gestures informed by bodily training, including the disciplined movements of taekwondo. A leaf is selected, torn, and brought to her nose. These actions require no verbal explanation, yet they are neither spontaneous nor entirely instinctive. Like painting, they involve relationships between learned technique, sensory experience, and the resistance of materials. The camera records what happens without assuming that the recording can account for everything taking place.

Somewhere between Brooklyn and Ojai, I began questioning my own impulse to translate these experiences into a coherent argument. Painting produces relationships that can be examined through language but cannot be reduced to it. A gesture may be described without accounting for the knowledge involved in performing it. The film brings Little's paintings and Picard's movements into relation without claiming that one explains the other. Their differences remain intact. Perhaps the more consequential question is not whether nature and artifice can be reconciled, but why we continue to require that distinction in order to understand what we make.