PAINTING IS DEAD, LONG LIVE PAINTING!
There is a chronic and recurring proclamation that emphatically announces the death of painting, a ritualistic and redundant gesture that, for more than a century, has accompanied every rupture that challenges the conventionalism of a generation confronting the new paradigms of expression that inevitably arise with the evolution of the media through which art manifests itself.
Many obituaries have been written by critics, predicting its obsolescence, necrologies that have been inspired by the rise of new technologies, leading to the declaration of the end of a medium historically considered the privileged vehicle of representation and truth. However, despite proclamations that emphasize its antiquity and inevitable demise, painting persists, not despite these transformations but thanks to them. To declare the death of painting is, superbly, to acknowledge the exhaustion of a particular historical function; to proclaim its survival is to acknowledge its resilient capacity for reinvention and its very immortality.
Painting, in all its manifestations, becomes a space of resistance to dematerialization and to the urgent demands that drive the acceleration of contemporary visual culture, which is based on images that circulate instantly and vanish as quickly as they appear. Painting endures, reflects, and slows time through contemplation, opposing the ephemeral nature of identity in this digital age. Painting resists the economy of immediacy, the redundancy of the binary image, and the short-lived amazement that, wearisomely, leads us to boredom, offering a counter-temporality that vehemently opposes impatience and haste.
The power of painting lies in its visceral nature, its vulnerability, and the ineffable irreducibility of its human condition, marked by spontaneity, subtlety, stridency, or the sublime. In an era increasingly mediated by algorithms and immaterial processes, painting survives and passionately resists the edict “Painting is dead!” With each declaration of its supposed end, it returns victorious, enunciating new visual languages, resisting linear evolutions and monumental technological “progress,” and leading us to proclaim in a loud and firm voice:
“Long live painting!”
Francisco Arevalo
