PAINTINGS OF PAINTINGS
2012 – the future | Series of paintings

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (published 1942)

With his works, Jari Genser puts his finger into a metaphysical wound. Talking about the „copy of the copy of the copy“ usually implies a lack of quality, which possibly manifests itself in a lower intensity of experience. One thinks of forgeries, replicas, plagiarisms, fakes, knock-offs, or the poor images of the digital era. Plato‘s criticism of artists comes to mind, because, as is well known, he wanted to ban them from his ideal republic because they produce imitations of imitations. According to this, every material object, for example a table, is the imitation of a pre-image in the realm of ideas, of which craftsmen then make copies.

When artists in turn imitate the material objects, they move another degree away from the actual thing and create illusions that have no place in the ideal republic. With a picture of a picture we move one step further away from the actual thing. With each new picture, the original substance becomes less. The modern disdain for the copy could thus have metaphysical roots in Plato‘s doctrine of ideas. Possibly underlying the preference for the artistic original is a deep metaphysical concern for the real (rather than a concern for distinctive features and investment).

Text: Klaus Speidel, A Joyful Conceptualism, 2022