On Illusion

The plywood grain, a fiction of nature, bears within it the residue of something it no longer is. A simulated memory of growth, pressed and repeated, it parades as natural while becoming fundamentally artificial. And yet, it is this illusion—this industrial mimicry of organic form—that becomes the ground upon which painting begins.

What, then, occurs when painting—historically the medium of illusion—is directed not to conceal, but to exaggerate the illusion already embedded within the surface? When paint does not cover but extends the grain? When brushstroke and woodgrain become indistinguishable, not in the pursuit of trompe l’oeil, but in the collapsing of categories: medium and ground, tool and object, human intention, and mechanical repetition?

In such a collapse, the plywood grain ceases to be a passive background. It becomes active, assertive—its artificiality amplified until it turns upon itself. The painting does not depict; it enacts. The image is not of something, but is something. A convergence of two simulations—paint and ply—creates a third thing: an object that refuses to resolve into either.

In this gesture, the traditional boundaries dissolve. The opposition between drawing and painting, between fine and crude, between handmade and manufactured surface—all begin to blur. The surface no longer distinguishes author from substrate, intention from accident. It becomes a field of mutual inscription, where the mind of matter and the mind of the maker enter correspondence.

Such a painting cannot be reduced to expression or representation. It becomes tautological—a form that refers only to itself, to its making, to its being. It is both tool and trace, illusion, and index. And in doing so, it retrieves a more ancient function of painting: not as depiction, but as ontological inquiry. Not as image, but as evidence that something was—and that it remains.

The act of painting upon plywood, when taken to this edge, is no longer a matter of aesthetics. It is philosophical. It is material thinking. It is an exploration of how illusion, once turned inward, begins to disclose not fiction but structure—not deception, but the very mechanics of how reality is mediated, constructed, and inherited.