I wanted to show you what I think are some great ideas for abstraction in this Tintoretto painting of the Deposition. First the idea of a episodic time is depicted. Tintoretto was great at including a number of events that occured at different times in one space. Here the movement of the procession to the tomb is crammed into one - In the "front" the virgin has fainted away and left on the trail, cared for by the Magdalene and another praying female figure - an allusion to the three graces - and the remaining living figures of redemption - through the feminine one can again find the living Christ. Above T has folded the space of the trail over them - folding both time and space to encapsulate the drama. Here the Christ figure is huge in comparison to the those figures carrying him - once again this creates a warping of the spaces and forms around this central figure. T makes this warping in order to pull us into the procession- stumbling over the fallen figures in the "front." We are meant to keep moving in close and shooting out beyond the picture plane. The lighting is from candles below flattening out the rock behind (instant abstraction) and accentuating the figures to the left - creating a heightened, unreal reality. Behind - the landscape swoops into the distance - from middle ground to infinity in the bat of an eyelash. T uses these tropes of form and space to electrify the scene. It is highly unrealistic and yet we read the figures and backgrounds as if it makes naturalistic understanding. This sort of visual movement makes perfect sense in our electronic time when space is constantly folded - we hone in instantly on things, objects, ideas - moving foreground to background and back again. Because of the proliferation of lenses we can be in close - like a satellite in space photographing a license plate - then zoom out to see an entire cityscape. The speed of this sort of vision is encapsulated by T in this painting and he focuses our visual attention through abstraction and naturalism. This is not like POMO where disparate images fall across a billboard - rather this a concentrated scene unfolding through time in one image - it is a kind of wacked out cubism where front and back, top and bottom are all seen at once, but rather than a modernist concentration of the artist's eye in the studio - like Picasso or Matisse - we have the Mannerist filmic version- exterior visual inference rather than interior construction. These ideas at this time are truly exciting. I've completed 6 new paintings and I'll be posting them on my painting site later in the week. They encompasse these ideas and continue my critique of POMO theories through this new type of abstraction. Check back for links! In the meantime T will set you free!