Moving Paintings

There is oil paint, and there is video. There is cardboard, and it is a canvas, and it is a screen. The aim is simple: I am trying to combine the quality of oil painting, its materiality – texture, pigments, brushstrokes – and an old dream of mine to see it animated, coming to life, breathing, through the video medium.
The three pieces, while being united by one single video-projection (mostly because of its technical possibilities), could each work on their own. Each of them is a different experiment, a subtle different approach to my main concern of “moving painting”.
The first one, which I called “The Cocktail Party”, is according to me the most successful of the three for combining and melting the video into the paint. The result is the depiction of an hazy movement, the figurative subject being quite unclear. Slow motion hurricane rambling bushes, a cocktail glass hanging in the corner. I painted it while the video was being projected onto it in a performance like action painting which I may develop into future projects.

The second one would be the “Lost in the Woods” video-painting. Much more figurative and thus narrative, you can see a dark box (actually a car battery) abandoned into the woods. It is glowing with a dark aura, emphasizing the uncanny aspect of the situation, the viewer asked to wonder why, what is it all about. It is much more a story-telling work than the first one.

“The Road” is the third and last one. Contrary to the first one, here the projection is the black and white “mapped” movement of a video, which applied to the still colorful oil painting results in a seemingly forward movement into the painting, onto the road.

Those three pieces, this installation, rise a lot of questions for me and my future projects: what do I really want to convey? How not to lose the materiality of the painting – which I'm really just beginning to understand, and don't want to put aside for a pure digital piece -? Isn't it like cheating in a way that I use video to hide flaws in my painting approach? Does the movement has to be forced to the viewer like this, couldn't it be part of the painting in its pigments, its brushstrokes, its inner light, in what A. Hollander in “Moving Pictures” calls proto-cinematic paintings?
Even though, I'l keep experimenting, both in painting, in video, as well as in their combination in the hope that something interesting will arise from it which I could then retranslate into maybe a more painterly way.