Isn’t it possible that an artist is discovering an experience for the first time in himself without the crutches of prior knowledge gained from books? Living the experience is different from book knowledge. And therefore prior historical images discovered or prevalent is of no consequence to the experiencer. Why label the artist for having shared his experience by filtering it through the gaze of art history. The artist could be innocent of those symbols and signs history is made of. Whose history are we talking about anyway?

So turn your gaze onto the artist first, pause there…and then we shall move…

You may ask then, aren’t you a part of history? Can you be separate, can you be granted bail? Yes, I am a part, but I definitely needn’t be aware of the history in order to be an artist. And it is only through oneself that you discover the world’s history, and not the other way around. An artist paints what he sees, and he paints through the history of his own self. I might go further to say that in fact it is possible only through the individual. In that sense, No, I am not part of your history, I am established, through the act of painting in the carving of my own history. Futile, vain perhaps. But it’s true.

The intention is not to separate oneself from the identities that history is built upon. One is only separating the sighting from the seen. Traveling in and out in search of identities, the inside becomes a mirror to the outside, and vice versa.