Intention and Interpretation

Intention verses interpretation -- both can work.

A painter painted and exhibited diptychs and triptychs of interiors, scenes and still lifes to varying degrees toward or away from representation -- the direction depending on whether one starts with the most classically representational (looks like what it is) or the more loose, deconstructed abstraction in the different views of the same subject.

A reviewer seemed to focus, with some despair on a stance that the work appeared in the reviewer's eye to take in relation to critical theory, particularly deconstruction and tropes of deconstruction a la conceptualism and painting, which was not the thing that the artist, according to the artist, was tackling. The artist, to paraphrase, was trying to "depicting (sic) simultaneous aspects of how people experience", giving pause to feeling "one continuous field of experience" as opposed to a clear delineation between being inside and outside of oneself, trying to get at something that he believed was ultimately "invisible." The paintings could be considered and analyzed with the reviewer's approach; biases effect our interpretations. But the paintings also worked the way the artist intended -- in my view because of the interplay between deconstruction and reconstruction as the eye moves from one depicted state to another. This perceived relay between reconstruction and deconstruction, form and un-form, is my interpretation, of course, and perhaps not what the artist intended.

Strong work operates on multiple levels, whether or not all the levels originally are intended, and I like that deconstruction, a trope sometimes employed to relegate painting to irrelevance, contrarily could bolster the reconstructive, meditative, and transformative potential of painting.