Material Metaphor and Reflexivity in Contemporary Painting: A Practice-based Investigation

Contemporary painting is a complex practice, and artists regularly incorporate elements from different media such as photography, textile, and performance. Despite its status being diminished by different conceptual art movements, painting still has a critically important place in the artworld. This importance is largely due to painting’s ability to stretch across media and make a direct appeal to the senses. In this article, an attempt is made to theorize the facility of painting to incorporate different media and its resulting reflexivity. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment and phenomenological theory of metaphor provide the theoretical means to articulate reflexivity in painting. Curatorial writing about contemporary painting and case studies of young painters from India form a backdrop for the analysis of examples from the painting practice of one of the authors to demonstrate the material dynamism of painting. It is shown that this reflexivity is intimately related to the sensuous texture of materials used in the creation of the paintings under discussion. The first-person narrative of artistic process and production provides insight into the embodied process of making and manipulating media and evidence that painters can create new insights about the ontology of painting.