Painting in the twenty-tens;where to now? : (You can’t touch this!)

Abstract: The essay is a manifesto-like personal take on painting, and a redefinition of painting in the digital age. Careless usage of the term ”painting” has led to a diluted descriptive function and a waning categorizing capacity; almost anything can be called painting, which in turn puts actual painting in an awkward position – where it, apart from being itself, could be almost anything. The term “painthing” is introduced to distinguish painting from works that beside its two-dimensional visual information also makes a point of its specific materiality. It brings up cave paintings and links to video-games, suggesting that video-games have gone through the reversed evolution of the history of painting – from abstraction to representation. It speaks of the problems of documentation – the translation of visual information (or re-flattening of a flat surface) – and the cultural equalization of information and images on the internet through the common denominator the pixel. It also describes “information painting”, which in short is digital painting where there is no physical object to be translated to a documentation of itself, but rather a painting that is original in its documentation form (its digital form), painting that strives to be nothing but the utopia of an image – the untouchable/unreachable visual information.