Preparing for Darkness

It’s time for a divorce. A divorce from a type of contemporary painting that seems suspended in eternal post-modernity; one that, through a marked lack of painterly skill, can’t seem to reference anything but itself. This state of modern art can be experienced as a “pluriverse” of styles, citations, and allusionswithout a semblance of internal coherence. (...) With this publication, I would like to pose a counter concept. The 15 selected European painters stand as examples of a generation marked by an exceptional intellectual approach to artistic practices. The resulting profound examination of art history, paired with extraordinary artistic skill, can be seen as veritable and imminent, as they each, through their own unique style, offer a real, pictorially comprehensible and perceptible dialogue between past art and their own inscribed emotional world. What unites them is a resurrection of melancholy, which returns to highlight the magical in a viewing experience. In that sense, my chosen metaphor “Preparing for Darkness” is meant to describe both melancholy and status quo, uniting these 15 artists, as unique as they are, into a new movement in contemporary art.