Painting Criticism or Painting as Criticism

In a talk given in 2019 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, art historian Isabelle Graw observed that painting enjoys enormous intellectual prestige and that it has been the subject, in recent years, of many analyses and theories.1 1  - Drawing on Graw’s book The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Mediumpublished in 2018 by Sternberg Press, the talk “The Vitality of Painting— Notes on the Success of a Medium” is available online.. The ongoing reaffirmation of painting’s vitality through different independent exhibition projects or through its valorization in museum collections likely helps to strengthen this perception. However, works offering in-depth reflections on the most current issues are rare, at least in the Canadian academic context. 

The decision made by Esse to present features dedicated to painting,² 2 - See in particular issue 76 of Esse,The Idea of Painting (Fall 2012).though our themes are often based on social issues, is part of an attempt to encourage critical analyses of painting practices. The idea of (re)seeing painting invited writers to move away from recurring considerations of its death and resurrec- tion, which, as Daniel Fiset emphasizes, “don’t go too far beyond the polemical or rhetorical: their constant references to previous art discourse turn their own arguments into a kind of living-dead.” It is important, however, to caution those who might expect this issue to offer a report on the state of painting today. While presenting a selection of articles that attest to the diversity of aesthetic and conceptual approaches to this art form, above all this issue puts forward some considerations of the different strategies deployed in art practices or dissemination networks. We note, for example, how the digital era has substantially trans- formed the modes of circulation and reception of painting, a transformation that has been exacerbated by the lockdown. The Web has not only enabled an unprecedented access to works, but has also con- tributed to their reappropriation by Internet users and their renewal outside of the art field. The mass culture conveyed by social media also feeds the imaginaries of many artists who, by channelling it into their work, create a kind of back and forth between the materialization of the digital on canvas and the dematerialization of painting in the virtual world where it is presented.