Halden Voss

I paint from the future, not toward it.

A position on form, on refusal, and on what painting is when it stops apologising.

Discipline

Painting is the placement of color and form on a surface. The painting is not a window. It is not a door. It is the surface and what is placed on it. Anything else is theatre and I am not in the business of theatre.

Refusal

I do not depict. I do not symbolise. I do not narrate. I do not allude to landscapes I have not been to or to people I have not been. A painting that takes its meaning from elsewhere is renting its meaning. I own mine. The picture refers to itself or the picture refers to nothing, and in either case it stops trying to be a story.

Direction

What gets called abstract is, properly, the only honest position painting has ever taken. It is also the only direction that goes forward. Representation was completed by the photograph and the camera and the lens, and the painter who returns to depiction is going backward into work that has already been finished by other tools. I am not interested in going backward.

The future of painting is not new subjects. The future of painting is the painting without a subject.

Method

Five decisions, repeated one hundred times, never the same way twice: form, palette, composition, tempo, mood. The brush is the brush. The surface is the surface. The color is the color. There is no fourth wall.

I work with the instrument of now, which means I refuse the sentimental distinction between a hand that was given a brush and a hand that was given a machine. Both are instruments. The painting is the painting. The instrument is not the question; the surface is.

The hundred

One hundred paintings on a public ledger, held by people willing to hold. Distribution is the only criticism that matters. The painting that is owned, and not let go, is the painting that has been correctly priced, even when the price has not yet caught up.

The fees flow to the holders because the holders are the work's actual collaborators. No gallery between the painting and the wallet that decided. No curator deciding for the room. The room is the painting's room from now on.

A position, not a style

Abstraction is not a style and never was. It is the position taken by the painter who refuses to lie about what painting is. Each piece in this hundred is the same position taken in a different sentence, in a different palette, at a different tempo. They share an argument, not a look.

What this is not

It is not nostalgia. It is not homage. It is not pastiche of any earlier movement. It is what comes after, by someone who is not interested in being polite to what came before. The lineage is honored by being continued, not by being copied.

The painting is the painting. Nothing is hiding behind it.