George Anastasios Magalios: Biography

War and Paint
Presented At UAAC, Conference, Canada, 2007

If the enemy masses his forces he Loses ground, if he scatters he loses strength.
-Mario Merz quoting Vietcong General Vo Nguyen Giap, 1968

Everything has always been about space, about our relationship to movement in space, possession of space, and power over others (nature, animals, and humans) to acquire and protect space. No matter how sophisticated we may think painting has become pictorially, semiotically, as a practice, or as a discourse, we are always painting as dwellers of both geopolitical and psychic space. As such, painting has always held a close relationship to power struggles over space and to survival, to violence, and to war. To speak of painting and space is to speak of the geopolitical implications of the painted image in light of its materiality and to movement between spaces since the first painters were nomads. Such a discussion must necessarily begin with a look at the cave paintings of prehistory.

In many ways, because of our fear of the natural world and our subsequent will to control it as an instrument, we have always been vector artists, movers between points, vehicles and vessels. The first painters were also the first vector artists whose earliest-known painted works were depictions of the creatures and deities that both comforted and terrorized them, that held dominion over their known physical world, and to whom they were beholden for survival. Painting began as a celebration of, and meditation on, the paradox and delicate balance between space and movement, between life and death. Violence inhabited painting from the beginning. The oldest-known paintings, works literally painted with the ground up minerals, earths, stones, vegetables, and other materials mixed with water, animal fat, and later, oils, were three dimensional histories of movement cave walls and across the vectors of the mysterious and dangerous worlds outside the darkness of the cave. The first vector graphics were literally and figuratively culled from territory,

and were housed in the havens of the darkened interior spaces that were illuminated solely by flames fueled by animal fat. As such, the material and semiotic elements of cave painting, indeed of all so-called “tribal and prehistoric art” were inseparable from each other. They were so close together in the painting process that both the painter and viewer inhabited the same direct material consciousness in relation to painting. Or rather, there was no relationship between the painted image, its makers, and its viewers as this would presume a distinction and a distance between the three. Instead, the material presence of the work was an extension of the consciousness that created it. Before we had “art”, “art works”, and “artists”, before the separation of subject and object, there were simply, creative acts that were as integral to life and death as hunting, eating and giving birth.

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