I went to see James Little in Brooklyn thinking I was still in the same conversation about spirituality and art, that it would return as language, as something I could recognize and position. Instead I kept circling a different binary, nature and artifice, not as opposition but as something that collapses inside the act of painting. He spoke about abstraction as a kind of public service, at its best a way of stabilizing perception rather than expressing it. The surfaces, resin, wax, pigment, don’t depict nature, but they aren’t simply artificial either. They register time, pressure, decision. I could feel myself trying to translate that back into discourse, to make it legible in the terms I’d been using. It didn’t hold.
Cut to Janina Picard in Ojai. The air is dry, the light too clean to hold onto. She doesn’t explain anything. She moves through a taekwondo form, slow enough that it almost disappears as action. I kept waiting for a cue, for the moment where it would declare itself as image or argument, but it never does. There is wind, ambient sound, a body continuing without instruction. If Little’s work resists by density, Picard resists by subtraction. Nothing is framed as nature, and so nothing can be used that way.
Somewhere between Brooklyn and Ojai I realized the structure I had been relying on, the circle, the discourse, the expansion outward, was still intact, still asking to convert everything into content. I could feel it happening in real time, the reflex to connect, to resolve. So I stopped. I didn’t ask for a conclusion. I didn’t try to hold the two together. The paintings remain where they are. The body continues its form. It ends without synthesis, which is maybe the only thing that hasn’t been absorbed.
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