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THE MISCONCPETIONS AND YOU

by Wess Dahlberg

I have come to realize that the art experience is 80% viewer and 20% painting. The viewer defines the art encounter, because his preferences, his beliefs about art and his immediate, personal concerns shape and color a painting much more than the artist had. The "better" the painting, the more even the playing field. I decided to turn the tables by offering the viewer a deliberate misconception.

The Misconceptions are a genetic splicing of conceptual and abstract painting. The representation of a word with its hand-painted misspelling (i.e., "conscius" representing "conscious") confronts the viewer with an apparent paradox: the painting is a beautiful "mistake"! The Misconceptions utilize the aesthetics of oil painting to integrate a non-truth, a misspelled word, with its logical negative: the corrected spelling in de Vinci mirror writing. In doing so, these paintings offer the viewer a special situation where three mental faculties - the visual, the linguistic and the logical - assess an oil painting. The selection of "conscious", "intelligent", "revelation" and "thought" place the viewer in a self-contemplative state.

The viewer has the power to respond to the non-truth in a number of ways, and may experience his emotions shift from confusion (what's wrong with this picture?), to uncertainty (is it misspelled?), to uneasiness (a misspelled word!), to a feeling of joyous liberation from social rules (how irreverent, how fun!), to feeling empowered as he combines the visual, linguistic and logical faculties to asses the misconception.

We could use these paintings as a springboard to discuss how social norms masquerade as absolutes or even how we are prone to visualize a physical world that conforms to misconceptions, as was the case with "flatlanders." But I prefer to keep this discourse close to the paint.

Los Angeles, 2005

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