Summary
76
The Idea of Painting
Fall 2012
Painting has more often than once been declared dead, yet it has nevertheless remained at the heart of artistic practices. The revival of interest that painting seems to be enjoying today has thus inspired the magazine esse arts + opinions to further explore this phenomenon. What to think of the dramatic “reappearance” of gestuality and technical virtuosity in the practice of the medium? Also, what can be said of the general scepticism directed towards painting for its supposed “natural” complicity with the art market? What about the notions of the window, the screen, and tableau, which have provided painting with its various theoretical models throughout history?
Editorial
Feature
Flirting with Death: Dispatches Along 19th to 21st Century Painting
The Object of the Idea
Guy Pellerin : Painting Distance (A Mental Construction Made Visible)
Stéphane La Rue, Color as Illusion of Painting
Blind Spots, Caesurae and Other Archival Lacunae
Dark Thoughts: Jinny Yu Starts Where Painting Ends
Relics as New Monuments: Destroyed painting
Performative art follows painting’s footsteps. The case of Vanessa Beecroft
Derek Sullivan More Young Americans
Body and Chaos in Christine Major’s Recent Work
The Animated World of Marina Roy
Portfolios
Columns
Reviews
Young Critics
Current Issue
Abstractions
Spring Summer 2025
Yet what about abstraction today? Long confined to formalist and self-referential imperatives, abstraction has gradually freed itself from the modernism yolk to recapture its evocative power. This issue proposes to turn away from the dogma of Abstraction as a historical genre to consider its various plastic and semantic avenues. In this invitation to explore abstractions, we wish to re-establish a dialogue between content and form, between the political and the poetic, by engaging with works that evoke reality differently. Whether they are qualified as abstract, non-figurative, or non-objective, these works certainly tell us stories.