Okay, so you’re not sure what to do with the framed painting or image. Is it just to small? There is a reason canvases seem to get bigger and bigger each time you visit the popular local gallery.
THE SYSADMIN:
Big sells. Big and Red. The only thing you have ever sold, is big and red.
But you still seem to absorb something from some paintings which is indeed difficult to experience the same way virtually. You dislike other paintings, so there must be a particular set of representations, ideas or feelings which penetrate the highly saturated tangled network of wires atop your neck. Therefore, it is not to say there are no historic painters, using the medium of paint in a way more closely associated with traditional painters, not necessarily representational but paint, on surface, in frame.
Painting has long been treated as a closed circuit: paint on a surface, held in a frame, stabilised for contemplation. This format, historically defended by modernist formalism, has also been widely critiqued for the way it naturalises limits: the edge of the canvas, the authority of the rectangle, the separation of image from context. Writers like Rosalind Krauss described this as a kind of institutional enclosure, where medium specificity becomes less a freedom than a policing of what art is allowed to be.
Later painters such as Albert Oehlen and Wade Guyton push against this closure, not by abandoning painting, but by breaking its internal rules: using digital files, printers, errors, repetitions, and logistical systems to expose the frame as an interface rather than a neutral boundary. In this sense, painting becomes less an image and more a process caught mid-circulation; contaminated by technology, reproduction, and failure.
Rather than rejecting paint outright, these critiques reposition it: not as a sacred surface, but as one node in a larger system of images, tools, screens, gestures, and distributions.
You can still look to for reference or representations of some of the contemporary concerns you and many others are experiencing now. Post WWII responses to rupture, trauma and absurdity surely resonate quite strongly with other real artists right now. Post-post WWII, painters are grappling with how paint on board in frame might not embody enough of what modernity is and feels like. The repeated, frantic, self-censoring erasure and layering found in the London School expressionists; Bacon and Auerbach in particular.
THE CARTOGRAPHER:
Oehlen, Wool, Kippenberger, Guyton, Sillman, Bradford, Lemmon.
You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you? Couldn’t even be bothered to credit their first names.
THE PANOPTICON:
You couldn’t have it any less figured out.
You remember a birthday present, a jigsaw puzzle of Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Fish walking on land. Birds riding humans. Giant strawberries. The tree-man. The Musical torture instruments. The bird-headed prince of hell. Could you, the conceptualist art/art-critic of our day, modernize these symbols and images?
THE CARTOGRAPHER:
Hybrid animal/human/creatures behaving incorrectly? Fluid identity, inversion of hierarchy, instability of the human category itself. Naked humans feasting on giant fruit? Consumer excess, meme logic, short lived-dopamine objects. The tree-man? A self-aware consciousness observing its own corruption. The musical torture instruments? A moral warning against indulgence, culture itself as a coercive structure. The bird-headed prince of hell? Metabolic punishment, a grotesque loop of consumption in a bureaucratic hell.
Perhaps there is just such a vast accumulation of bizarre semiology, imagery and contemporary concerns which not only resurfaces histories and lores but also add to them continuously. You take a moment to really look at the Bosch triptych. Why does it kind of look like GenAI? Because the foundations of what you know to be true are being tested by every click of your mouse. Truth and trust are disintegrating.
Writing, like painting, is difficult to prioritise for and set up circumstances which might allow for it: a slow, linear, materially grounded practice that struggles to resemble the fragmented, accelerated, recursive structures of contemporary media and life. Neither medium mirrors the way consciousness is now shaped – by feeds, tabs, notifications, hyperlinks, algorithmic prediction. And yet, both retain something stubbornly tangible. A residue. A friction. Even when writing is displaced onto screens, even when painting absorbs digital logic, there is still a bodily encounter: time passing, attention narrowing, the hand or eye committing to a mark, a sentence, a decision. This shift in utlising the mediums is your progression with them, those contemporary experiences reflected in adaptations to those mediums and methods.
Painting in pixels, hex data, smearing screen tears, glitches, palimpsest, collage, layering, scribbling, writing, erasing. All the stuff, all the time, everywhere at once, over and over. That is the contemporary experience, or it feels like that, for you.
THE CARTOGRAPHER:
Everyone else is probably loving how easy it is to generate ten second clips of Stephen Hawking blasting a halfpipe with Mao Zedong and Tony Hawk watching in awe.
That’s where the contradiction sits. Any hybrid of the two – analogue thinking filtered through digital infrastructure – will inevitably feel “natural,” not because it is innocent or pure, but because we adapt. Unfortunately, perhaps. Or perhaps not unfortunately at all, simply historically. People are now habituated to reading on screens, often more than on paper, and this isn’t necessarily a collapse of meaning so much as a shift in its container. What feels bleak is not the screen itself, but the systems layered onto it: speed, monetisation, optimisation, surveillance. The fear isn’t that writing migrates to screens; it’s that thought becomes formatted by the logic of platforms rather than by necessity, slowness, or care.
And hovering over all of this is the looming presence of AI — not just as a tool, but as an atmosphere. A pressure. A reminder that language, image, and style can now be simulated at scale, extracted, recombined, predicted. This doesn’t make writing or painting obsolete, but it does destabilise their authority as privileged sites of human expression. The anxiety comes from proximity: the uncomfortable realisation that what once felt deeply human can be partially automated, while what remains irreducible is harder to name, defend, or measure.
So perhaps the task isn’t to make writing or painting resemble modern media more accurately, nor to retreat into their supposed purity, but to let them malfunction slightly inside contemporary systems. To allow slowness to exist within screens.
THE SYSADMIN:
Could we categorise anything as a painting using a basic skeleton of parameters, if you are going to be so reductionist?
THE MYSTERY MAN:
Could toast be a painting?