Reading as Artistic Research — Juan Tardivo

READING

Reading is part of my artistic process. Philosophical, literary and poetic texts do not function as theoretical frameworks to be illustrated, but as encounters that alter the direction of the research. A book may generate a question, destabilise an existing one, or make visible a relation that painting had not yet been able to formulate.

THE EMERGENCE OF PERCEPTION

How does a painting begin?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Eye and Mind · Cézanne's Doubt

Merleau-Ponty understands painting not as the representation of an already existing world, but as a way of making perception visible. Vision is not detached observation but an active encounter with the world. A painting therefore does not illustrate an idea; it allows a question to emerge through the act of seeing.
For Birth of a Question, these reflections mark the beginning of a research in which painting is understood as a mode of inquiry rather than a means of representation.

THE NEW IMAGINARY

How does an image exist?

Jean-Paul Sartre

The Imaginary

In The Imaginary, Sartre argues that an image is not a copy of reality but a distinct mode of consciousness. It does not reproduce the world; it transforms our relation to it. The image emerges through absence, imagination and perception, opening a space where reality can be reconfigured rather than represented.These reflections shifted my research away from the body as representation towards the image as a field of relations. Painting is no longer understood as an image of the body, but as the place where temporary forms, tensions and spatial structures become visible.

The Exposed Body

How does a body become relation?

Jean-Luc Nancy

Corpus · L'Intrus

Nancy’s thought shifts the body away from fixed identity and towards exposure, relation and transformation.
In L’Intrus, the arrival of the foreign element becomes an analogy for each new painting: it enters the research and reorganises everything that came before it.

The Absurd

Why does painting never come to an end?

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus

The myth of Sisyphus offers a way of understanding painting as a continuous act: each work carries a question to its limit without resolving it, making the next painting necessary.

Cultural Transformation

Why do symbolic structures change?

Oswald Spengler

The Decline of the West

Spengler’s morphology of history introduces the idea that symbolic orders are not permanent. They emerge, develop and lose coherence, transforming the ways in which bodies inhabit and interpret the world.