#381 Painting With Cigar

The object on the top of the panel is a cigar case containing an actual cigar, or what is left of it. It was given to me by my brother many years ago as a Christmas gift. For this work, I used it to make a drawing in the wet filler.

Every artwork has a history, and the artist biography is part of it. Context is always invisible, but at the same time crucial for our understanding of the world. What we know, changes what we see. Language is always at work in perception. But there is always something unknown in every image. A secret ingredient that ensures a minimum distance between signifier and signified, between map and terrain. Privacy contains the same logic. Without a minimum distance between the inner self and the public persona, the subject would collapse. The strange thing though, is that no matter how much we expose ourselves, there is always something left hidden. Not the least to ourselves.

The series features works with an appendix placed on top of the work or close to it. This object is exterior to the image plane, the illusionary "window" in the picture, but is still an intrinsic part of the whole. It connects or makes visible the two dimensions of an artwork - its inner logic and the relation to its surrounding.
The title references both the famous campaign by Coca-Cola and Immanuel Kant's notion of the thing in itself. It means that subjects can only experience the phenomenons as they present themselves, through perception. It is always fundamentally different from what the things are outside the barrier of language - in themselves.

Res Ipsa is a compilation of works made by an act shaping the filler once it is prepared inside the frame. The works thus function as a recording device and give a statement of the event taking place while the filler was still wet.

Res Ipsa is Latin for "the thing itself" and is part of the juridical term "Res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), used when an injury or accident in itself clearly shows who is responsible, such as an instrument left inside a body after surgery.