Phillip Buntin
Statement
In this body of work I have conjoined, manipulated and obfuscated diagrams from math, biology, psychology, and chaos theory along with excerpts from their texts with selections from Roland Barthes’ “The Lover’s Discourse”. In each work the diagrams included allude to the quantification and explication of love in scientific terms, while the Barthes selections (seen in cursive in each image) express aspects of interpretive subjectivity that fall outside of the boundaries of scientific understanding. An interpretive subjectivity that is, in Barthes’ own words, “the thinking of the body in language” [Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes 145].
In abutting these two approaches to understanding in a visual format, I strive to find an uneasy equilibrium between how one comes to terms with the elusive and uniquely personal aspects of experiences with their quantification and rationalization in scientific terms. This is an intentionally uneasy equilibrium, as I want to remind the viewer of their own limitations when “thinking of the body in language.” Since it is my belief as well as Barthes that our understandings or interpretations of our experiences are simultaneously illuminated and delimited by our objective and subjective interpretations of them.
To achieve this uneasy equilibrium of fragmentary wholes, I have constructed the paintings to accentuate the perceptual differences between viewing something as an image both near and far, with the experience of reading a fragmentary text. When engaging with all the different aspects of the work you will notice a change of approach in yourself when moving from one to another. This change and the subsequent desire to link the various parts back together is an important experiential aspect of the work, as it is a means to express our limitations in the face of complexity. While all the included text and imagery in each painting is related on some level, sometimes directly so, and at other times allusively so, they remain somewhat separate. This separate quality if considered in concert with the accentuation of differences in the viewing experience and our inability to bring them together in a single interpretation of the painting, allows us to understand directly that our interpretations are illuminating yet incomplete, and as such always open to reevaluation.
Phillip Buntin