hans groen *17 09 1959 - †11 08 2022


art

‘Painting with light’ one can call this. While enjoying the abstract colour pattern, try to figure out how I did this.

Art is telling a story about what you see. Not an individual expression, but a communicable. As Immanuel Kant said: for art one needs genius and taste, and taste is the schoolmaster of genius. Without taste, the genius cannot communicate. The reference is thus what people understand — you either follow the existing understanding, or go against that understanding. In both case, you communicate. Just following your own individual expression of an individual emotion does not communicate anything. That goes for all kinds of art.
Avant garde use expressions that go against the common understanding. After a time, they become mainstream. More and more people nowadays enjoy the violin concerto of Alban Berg, it is becoming part of our collective heritage.
Deliberately seeking the clash creates only a closed-off group of artist who mutually masturbate on their misunderstanding — conceptual art, this is called, I think, genius without taste. The goal of valid art is communication.
The clash in figurative art is that the picture has its own esthetics, despite the thing being pictured. A horrible subject only communicaties when the picture is esthetic (see World Press Photo).

Elsewhere on the web:

www.worldpressphoto.org/ …
The website of World Press Photo.