"Conceptual artist Mel Bochner has been active since the 1960s, starting practices that are now taken for granted, such as using gallery walls as a canvas for his work. A highly versatile artist, Bochner works with painting, installation art, and photography. His thesaurus paintings show overlapping synonyms executed in rainbow colors, while other pieces often take a single word, repeated for effect."
"Throughout his career, the artist has explored the intersection of linguistic and visual representation. The overriding question at the heart of his project has always been the same - How do we receive and interpret different types of information?
His thesaurus paintings are an important part of this particular enquiry. With their focus on text and its interpretation, these works re-imagine language as a form of pictorial expression. Word chains intertwine painting and language using colour. Big, bright and witty, they start with one word – ‘Silence’, ‘Amazing’, ‘Crazy’ – and the rest of the painting is made up of synonyms pulled from a thesaurus and listed from top left to bottom right in lines as on a page, the register descending dramatically into slang and expletives. His use of colour sometimes affirms the language it is painting and at other times ignores it, intentionally avoiding colour systems and patterns. These paintings make us think about the acts of reading and looking, and representation and abstraction, and how they cross over. The thesaurus painting is just one of many rationalising systems that Bochner uses to question and explore our irrational trust in language and the world around us."
I've taken a look at this artist's work because, although he don't use imagery in his work, he often makes the text look interesting, using different styles, colours and effects in his paintings. This means his words are able to take on a form of imagery in their own right.
I think I'd like to do something similar, even though I will be using text and imagery in my work. Rather than having the text portion of my work look bland and simple, I would like to do something just subtle to the text to make it a bit more exciting.
Comments