LBBDSS

Universal History of Painting is a project that started as part of my undergraduate thesis project “The Funambulist World,” presented for Los Andes University at Textura Cultural Centre in 2012. The series U.H.P, which for the thesis installation comprised merely 15 pieces, was always thought as a larger project required to continue after my time in college. Until now, I have made 98 pieces plus three waiting to be completed, for a total of 101 paintings. Even if the essence of the project has remained intact, the project has evolved through new formats (medium and large sizes), more complex patterns, a new color (red,) and different ways of installing.

 

U.H.P. doesn’t pretend to be an academic discourse nor present coherent arguments regarding the evolution and classification of the universal history of painting. The result is, finally, capricious: like or dislike for certain pictorial manifestations that have appeared through the course of human history. If there is an election or discard, it is due to personal like and nothing else; if there is the inclusion of unknown artists and exclusion of great masters it is because I seek to cover styles, manners, and perceptions distant to each other. Compiling different formal, discursive, and material contents result indispensable to observe that, that in image visualization terms, there is no longer diversity: everything is reduced to zeros and ones, to endless chains of on and off transistors.

 

Information technology does not recognize anything; at the interior of computers, there are no intentions, there are no thoughts, there are no questions nor answers. This is what Universal History is about. Humanity has made sure to drag everything to the binary code in order to save space, to make everything more accessible, to make everything faster and more efficient. Everything perceivable is a print, a die-casted fabric that presents the binary code of its immediate referent.

 

Each painting is unique and unrepeatable, not only because each mother code is different, but because each painting is still executed manually, erratically and mechanically, despite their digital wrapping. The prints are made with a matrix printer (EPSON FX – 1180) that has a printhead with five needles that hit the fabric or any other substrate with which it’s fed. The printing options aren’t many because the printer doesn’t have a range of hues or colors. The needles, just like the code that they imprint, are "outside" or i"nside", “on” or “off”. There are black paintings and red paintings. There are mostly codes.