SIGNAL
057
We used to start with ideas.
The work taught us to stop.
Ideas Don’t Count
A short clip of the painter Lorenzo Pompa has been following us around.
He says ideas don’t count. The worst thing that can happen is ideas.
Pompa worked as an architect before he became a painter, and architecture runs on ideas. You have one, everyone commits, money gets attached, planning begins. Halfway through, you start to see what the idea got wrong, but by then it’s too late. The machine is moving. The idea gets built anyway.
The longer you live with an idea, the more clearly you see its limits. An idea is at its most convincing on day one.
The Images Are Already There
Pompa is convinced the images already exist. They still have to be made, but they are made as something that was already there. You don’t invent them. You arrive at them.
It’s an old conviction. Michelangelo wrote in a sonnet that the best artist holds no concept the marble doesn’t already contain. The figure is in the stone. The work is removing what isn’t the figure.
For a painter that’s a belief. For us it’s close to a literal description of how we work. Generative systems hold more images than anyone will ever see. Typing an idea into a machine is not the work. Finding the one image that matters is.
You can’t generate taste. If the images are already there, taste is the only job left.
Showing Up
When ART EVERY DAY began, we were still conceptual. The early works started with ideas, and we held on to them. It took a while to admit that ideas don’t go deep enough.
So the practice changed. We’ve published a new work every day since July 2022, and at some point they stopped starting with concepts. They start with being in front of the work. You can only recognise an image if you’re standing where images appear.
Pompa says that on the way to the thing you planned, so many things happen that take you somewhere else entirely. An executed idea never gets to go there.
The good images are the ones something happened to on the way.
From the studio,
Nastassja & Christian
Lorenzo Pompa, lorenzopompa.com
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