Ulysses Belz and his revolutionary Project of Thinking-in-Painting
Metacognition refers to the awareness an individual has of their own mental processes (also referred to as 'thinking about thinking'). In the past thirty years metacognition research has become a rapidly growing field of interdisciplinary research within the cognitive sciences.
The Foundations of Metacognition, by Michael J. Beran, Johannes Brandl, Josef Perner, Joelle Proust; Oxford 2012.
/ clouds / frontiers / messengers /
In our daily experience, clouds are evanescent, vaporous masses, defying any objectification. Still science tells us that they actually consist of an indistinguishable crowd of invisible droplets and frozen crystals. Belz's clouds are not clouds as we think we know them. They are there to be perceived as painted surfaces, and understood as pictorial signs (from now on: /clouds/). /Clouds/ have a deep and fascinating potential for association. How can one make associations on the basis of icons, without words? Here is an answer from philosophy. Pictorial signs do not only owe their meaning to what they analogically represent – here, clouds. They also work as indexes. Just as languages have words for referring to the person we are talking about ("she"), this or that time ("now", "then"), pictorial signs can use their analogical content to refer to invisible properties, such as change, uncertainty, past ways of painting. Because of the open nature of indexing, there is no a priori limit for representing the invisible in pictorial signs. Thinking-in-painting and thinking-in-viewing both use indexing as a medium for a mode of figurative understanding that cannot be fully captured in spoken languages.
A major step in viewers' indexing process of /clouds/ as pictorial signs depends on noticing that, in Floating States, /clouds/ happen to map specific countries: Britain, The United States, Denmark, the late Weimar Republic, Greece, Japan, Switzerland, The Virgin Islands, Baleares Islands. A pictorial sign such as /cloud/, however, does not amount to a revelation, an unveiling of hidden realities out there. It is rather a pointer to a deeper layer on our mental canvas, an encouragement to sense the floating motive from a fresh viewpoint.
From this viewpoint, contingency is a key feature of the composition. A cloud looking like a state is a most unlikely phenomenon. /Clouds/ only contingently map states and national borders. In Floating States, the contingent mapping of /Clouds/ to states leads to recognize contingency in what is mapped as well. Random collective phenomena have defined provisional, contingently precise borders, wrongly perceived as fixed and intangible. Just as clouds, frontiers both materialize and dissolve across time. Like clouds, states have their apparent, drifting contours and their invisible reified constituents such as citizens and institutions. This is only a first line of thought elicited by /clouds/, however.
In classical painting, as emphasized by Hubert Damisch, /clouds/ often have the function of figuring otherness (altérité). They index an alternative space where the physics of bodies no longer holds, a space of blessing, triumph, radiant joy, revealed truth, which contrasts with human misery, doubts, pains and uncertainties. /Clouds/ are spatially contrasted with worldly realities: higher spheres of transcendent beings occupy the top of canvases. In Floating States, in contrast, /clouds/ are not assigned to a conventional partition of the canvas. They have an altogether different pictorial sign-content and indexing potential. Instead of offering a paradoxically spectacular representation of the invisible, Floating States radically shift the significance of painting away from any ontological revelation. Floating States make the painter's own uncertainties, doubts, and questions about art pictorially manifest to viewers. A central example of uncertainty has to do with perspective.
/Clouds/ can be viewed as if from below, as in classical painting. Realist attractions may still marginally be lurking in the back of viewers' mind. Clouds belong to the sky above, /clouds/ tend to be seen as if from below. From this viewpoint, and although they occupy the full canvas, /clouds/ contingently, but in a sense also miraculously turn out to have the specific appearance of state borders. From this viewpoint, /clouds/ appear as states, as homelands: ethereal shelters of some kind.
Let us reverse the perspective, and look at the figurative content as if from above. Now states appear to be cloud-like entities, set out on the blue background: a sea, a continent, or just the conventional colour for nostalgia, love, regret. Who is the viewer from above? God, an astronaut, an atlas reader, a poet, a philosopher, or the painter himself.
Stabilizing a specific interpretation or perspective, however, would miss the pictorial point of Floating States. The point is not to stage an amusing referential ambiguity, à la Arcimboldo. It is rather about allowing pictorial signs to emerge, i.e. questioning the selection of a privileged referent, and replacing it with an open-ended sequence of questions, associations and dissociations. Belz's work takes canvas as an invitation, perhaps even as a command, to think-in-looking, in a way that tentatively corresponds to the painter's own activity of thinking-through-painting. The word "tentatively" is essential: uncertainty prevails in viewers' activity, as it does in the very act of painting. Any attempt at identifying – stabilizing – the painter's specific intention, would entirely miss the point.
The painter's attempt to make privately entertained, transient mental states visible finds a powerful expression in a third kind of floating elements: neither /clouds/ nor /states/, but elongated filaments and fleshy blobs: /Floaters/. These pictorial elements provide meaning, balance and movement to Belz's Floating States much as angels, cherubs, and seraphs do in classical religious painting. They do not evoke celestial creatures, however, far from that. Standing at the forefront, always in full, unobstructed sight, they are not subject to perspective. Their specific way of floating in the forefront invites a naturalistic interpretation: just as /clouds/ are (depict) clouds, /floaters/ are flying flies in the vitreous humour. Consonant with this interpretation is their graphic aspect evoking cell debris. A realistic interpretation, however, is again to be resisted. /Floaters/ may have something to do with Ulysses Belz's own visual flies. Yet /floaters/ are primarily pictorial signs. They are an essential part of the painter's syntax, here and elsewhere. Part of the viewer's own reflective activity is to capture their role as dynamic pointers.
/Angels/ and /cherubs/, in classical paintings, work as pictorial signs of invisible tri-dimensional entities. /Floaters/ are neither sacred nor spectacular icons, and they are not related to the sky as an external floating medium. They rather float in a two-dimensional space – the space of the retina (as an irregular light reflection), or of the canvas. They acquire a sign-quality of their own: Floaters are transparent additions to sight. In other words, they are unrelated to the contents of vision, but they do not block them either.
Floaters, then, elicit attentional transitions between a visual singularity (a blob, a filament) and an open-ended interpretive sequence. /Floaters/ as pictorial signs index the subjective, individual quality of artistic forms of thinking-in-looking. Even when crossing our visual field at its periphery, /floaters/ have a major graphic function, as elements of unarticulated questions and responses. Just as angels were flying messengers of God's will, /floaters/ are freely floating messengers for a new type of art perception.
Floating States finally include an entirely different set of pictorial icons, associated with maps and electric appliances: graduated scales expressing distance or intensity. Whenever scale icons are used, they are typically interpreted as floating signs whose significance depends on their context of use. Measure is an objective fact; use is flexible. This duality confers to graduated scales a kind of autonomous and directive iconic status: in a painting they seem to be intruders, but simultaneously provide a conditional anchor on which our mental ship might stop and rest. Scales, from this viewpoint, work as attentional commands.
Floating States are a new step in Ulysses Belz's thinking-in-painting revolutionary metacognitive project. /Clouds/ as states, /states/ as clouds, /Floaters/ and /Gradient scales/ are the elements of Ulysses Belz's present figurative syntax. These powerful works renew the concept of visual arts by questioning head-on naïve ontological assumptions. Floating States pictorially demonstrate the existence of mental time in painting, the time needed to understand, remember, associate, infer, doubt, search again, without any kind of anticipation or planning, as a fundamental iconic, non-conceptual dimension in art.
On Course for New Spaces
Painting, as a traditional point of intersection between external vision and inner perception, is undergoing social and esthetic realignment due to advances in the field of consciousness and brain research in the early twenty-first century. Mental processes encompassing abstract concepts of human existence formerly regarded as unable to be materialized or concretized – such as consciousness, perception, language, and emotions, but equally mood, motivation, and concentration – are becoming increasingly definable on a molecular and genetic basis.
Ulysses Belz approaches from the viewpoint of an artist the challenging and complex questions surrounding the possibility of visualizing mental processes. In many years of intensive preoccupation with cognitive neurosciences, he has developed a mode of painterly expression that he terms "metacognitive painting".
The concept of metacognition, introduced in the early nineteen-seventies by the psychologist John H. Flavell and the physiologist Henry M. Wellman, focuses on the analysis of one's own perceptive processes, that is to say, on knowledge of how we can know [1]. For Ulysses Belz, it is the plastic interest in the processes by which occurrences and memories are stored, filtered and retrieved.
From an angle of self-perception arise compositions that make visible a figuration beyond figuration. In works like "Spare Bed", "Viennese Hotel Room", or "Archive", which in the broadest sense still embody an existentialist sensibility paying reverence to the work of Francis Bacon, it is possible to discern the germination of a confrontation with personal recollection, the processual nature of which is already reflected in the all-over treatment of the canvas in "Daylight".
"Selfportrait Contemplating the Sky" represents a striking developmental step forward. Despite the implication of the title, the painting has nothing of an individual self-proclamation but seems more like a cosmological speculation. The painter's view of the heavens includes, as a biomorphic seal of existence, a depiction of "mouches volantes" (commonly known as eye-floaters), those thread-like strands or dotted structures fleetingly inscribed on the field of vision and perceived as entoptic phenomena by almost everybody. As a selfportrait it is a descendant of Ernst Mach's drawing of himself as a headless figure lying on his sofa, whereby not only the mirror image of the classical selfportrait is avoided, but simultaneously the question is raised of the internal generation of the external world [2].
Despite the precise corpuscular definition in paintings like "Patience" or "Timetable", there is no trace of a return to figuration. Similarly, fundamental concepts of abstraction are largely eliminated. These works – and even more so "Reactions to a Ringtone", "Wasps" or "Thank you, Mother" – provide examples for the way in which the viewers are required to neuronally grasp the structural patterns presented to them in order to be able to appreciate by non-rational means the correspondence between picture and title.
In order to enter into a relationship with Ulysses Belz's paintings, viewers must compare with their own experience the painterly proposal regarding an internal process. It is a wordless communication in which a pictorial investigation is undertaken into shared patterns of stimulation. According to Ulysses Belz, a picture is a mental object produced in the field of neuronal connections and able to assert itself only within the dynamic of previously unknown algorithms. Painting can thus make no statements about the outside world without deceiving itself about its own character.
Ulysses Belz's metacognitive painting articulates a neuronal esthetics, an artistic formalization of absolute immediacy, which approaches the sublime of contemporary art from an innovative perspective.