2.Atrium The atrium, or main courtyard, was the locus of the domus, the center of the house’s social and political life. It was dominated by an opening in the roof, the compluvium, and mirrored by a sunken basin in the floor below, the impluvium. While this design served to bring in light and air to an otherwise dingy and gloomy interior, and to catch and funnel rainwater for household tasks, I see the beauty of the twinned portals as an invitation to contemplate Eternity and Reflection, two of painting’s central preoccupations. The skylight presented an ever-changing framed “picture” of the atmosphere. When filled with water, the impluvium refracted this spectrum of hours, weather, colors. Taken together, any resident or visitor must have been lulled by the tranquility, the chance to get lost in the timeless passage out of the here and now. These are the escape hatches that give flight to the imagination, and reinforce my vision of painting as an experience bounded by a frame that paradoxically hinges on entrances and exits. The frescoes of Pompeii enact a game of depth and illusion with the technology of looking, finding ways to “break through” the flatness of the walls they are painted upon, via the obsessive re-creation of thresholds: frames, doors, windows, skylights, balconies, platforms, stages, empty space, and shifts in scale. All of these devices have the aim of interrogating the limits of painting by inviting the viewer to go beyond them. Painting has been self-reflexive from the start, inquiring into its own potentiality and dangers, by pointing to the act of looking, which is to say, back to painting. This is not navel- gazing, even though Narcissus has been called the first painter (when he unwittingly fell in love with his own reflection on the surface of the water)—it’s a drive born of a desire to question, test, and push the medium. What is the surface of the pool made of exactly? Where is it? How is the self not an illusion, divided, and divided again, into multitudes? How inexhaustible is eternity? There is no content that does not refer back to its construction, or to the body that theatrically beholds it. The open sky and the rolling water together speak the story of painting; the wall and the canvas listen, and repeat the telling … —AK
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online