Time and Technics

The transformation of the tree into plywood is not a process of growth, but of rupture—sudden, calculated, and violent. It is a technical operation enacted under the demands of industrial time: rapid, extractive, and irreversible. What once took decades of slow accumulation is undone in hours. Pressed, glued, and standardized, the organic becomes optimized—rendered into a surface that is accessible, efficient, cost-effective, and ultimately, disposable.

This rupture is not merely material; it is temporal. In the logic of industrial technics, time itself is restructured. Bernard Stiegler described this as the shift from chronos to kairic acceleration—a decoupling of human perception from organic duration, in which the tempo of life is subordinated to the velocity of production. Plywood, in this frame, becomes a condensed artefact of modernity: its very form inscribes the compression of time, the disappearance of the tree’s slow becoming.

Yet within this object—a residual surface, a composite skin—traces of origin remain. The simulated grain, while artificial, gestures toward its lost ancestry. It is this trace that invites attention, not as nostalgia, but as an index of disruption. To work upon such a surface with slowness is not an act of restoration, but of resistance. It is a temporal countergesture: an insistence on duration within a regime of speed.

Where industrial production erases the tree’s biography, a mode of making that returns to the rhythm of organic growth begins to re-inscribe time. Each mark becomes a defiance of disposability—a reactivation of presence through the very material meant to be overlooked. The surface, once intended to disappear beneath function, is made visible again. The substrate becomes substance.

In this reversal, time is not reclaimed but refigured. The plywood grain, a fiction of nature, is engaged not as illusion, but as consequence—as evidence of a deepening distance between human and material origin. And yet, through sustained attention, through an ethic of temporal intimacy, this distance is held open. The work becomes a site where the accelerated life of matter meets the slow return of form. A site where origin is not recovered, but encountered—again and again.

On Structure

Every work is preceded by another. The mark is never singular; it is the visible crest of a sequence, the sign of a lineage. In this lineage, the painted surface and the wooden ground no longer remain distinct. A moment arrived in my practice, in the dim light of the studio, when the illusionistic rendering of black fabric—painted beneath a still life of black apples—collapsed into the real grain of the panel beneath it—not by design, but by recurrence. Such moments do not begin; they return. They are recognitions of preexisting forms reappearing in altered guises.

Plywood, itself a composite of prior transformations, carries the structural memory of its making. Peeled from tree, layered by hand or machine, glued into sheets—it is already a record, a sediment of action. Its function in construction is not incidental but central: it is chosen for its strength, which derives not from its solidity, but its layered oppositions. The plies resist and reinforce. Structure becomes strategy.

To paint upon such a surface is not to inscribe but to converse. The artist does not create ex nihilo but collaborates with what time has already arranged. The drybrush method of heightening the grain arose as a response to the material’s rhythms and a way of resisting speed. So too the oil medium—selected not for its prestige, but its temporality. Slow drying allows for reflection, for delay, for forms to coalesce not instantly but across days. Each gesture becomes a sediment, the oil sits on the surface, irreversible.

The act of choosing a panel—hours spent searching, lifting, testing the orientation of the grain—is integral to the compositional decisions. The plywood’s voice is not given equally to each piece; some sheets withhold, some are more extravagant. The back, the edge, the face turned to the wall: these contain structures not visible from a view, but that are essential to the work’s unfolding. The hidden is translated, all surface is treated as surface, continuous.

As painting emerged from the cave as one of the earliest cultural inventions, so too does this work re-situate painting not as decoration but as duration. It preserves and carries forward an idea of painting’s objectness. In the dark of prehistoric shelters, gestures became rhythms, rhythms became repetition, repetition became memory. And through this, a form of life articulated itself.

Here, invention is not novelty. It is recurrence with variation—what George Kubler called the “descent of things,” where each object emerges not in isolation but as a solution within a historical sequence of problems. In this logic, invention becomes a temporal structure: each work a node in an extended lineage, echoing and departing from its predecessors. In Kubler’s terms, prime objects initiate new sequences, setting formal or conceptual precedents. But they are rare. Most works are part of chains of variation—differentiations that signal continuity even in rupture. My work does not seek to invent in the modernist sense of rupture or originality, but rather participates in the ongoing articulation of a form that precedes me: painting as a practice of thinking through materials.

Structure precedes image. Not as scaffolding to be concealed, but as logic to be revealed. The plywood panel, misrecognized in its ubiquity, holds within it an inheritance of forests, factories, and furniture. It is a modern object—but also a palimpsest. Each ply, a turning of grain, resists linearity. Its construction is rotational: an alternating rhythm of resistance and yield. To work with such a material is to align oneself with the idea that strength and consistency emerges through layers.

The sculptural forms are not simply built from plywood; they are built because of material characteristic of plywood. That is, the structures are not imposed upon the material—they are drawn from it, induced by it. The panel is not passive. Its thickness, its edge, its capacity to bear load, dictates form. To fold, to mitre, to plane—it is not adornment, but negotiation. The work becomes sculptural through the reputation and history of the material.

The gesture is both an intervention and a continuation. In the drybrush technique, the gesture does not declare—it listens. It traces and amplifies. The pigment is suspended rather than applied, accumulating across the grain’s contours like silt across stone. The brush does not conceal the substrate; it reveals it slowly, like erosion in reverse.

This is a practice not of depiction, but of translation. The plywood grain, already an industrially produced abstraction of nature, is further abstracted into visual rhythms, into form. Yet this translation is not from one language into another. It is from one state of matter into another state of potential meaning. The substrate is not blank; it is latent. What emerges has always been there, waiting under the surface, shaped by the same forces that shaped the hand.

The idea of painting as the first human language does not stand apart from this—it is its precondition. When pigment met stone in the dark of the Palaeolithic interior, it was not merely to describe, but to preserve. To interrupt loss. To render time visible and recursive. Each mark in the cave was both unique and identical—a hand, a bison, a spiral—and yet none were final. Repetition was the medium of memory; it grew biologically which is why I believe painting is biological.

Here too, repetition becomes strategy. Not for sameness, but for revelation. One grain leads to another, one panel speaks to the next. The work does not develop linearly but in constellations. The forms echo and fold, returning in different guises. The same gesture across another ply tells a different story. Each structure is both isolated and interdependent—fragments of a larger rhythm.

Invention, then, is not genesis. It is rearrangement. Of substance, of sequence, of tools and intentions. It is an adjustment of orientation—a tilt, a turn, a revaluation of what was thought inert. The artist here is not innovator in the modern sense, but witness and medium. The act of choosing, of attending, of submitting to material intelligence, is itself a generative act.

And so, from tree to plank to ply, from gesture to grain to form, the work positions itself within a lineage that exceeds the present. It is not an origin, but a node. Not a final statement, but a structure through which others might pass.

Conceptual Reflection

In my work, tautology is not a flaw—it is the method. Wood upon wood: painted, painted with, painted about. A painting of grain on the grain, not as illusion but as doubling. Not as simulation but as echo. The subject becomes its own substrate, the medium its own meaning. The painting no longer depicts; it enacts and invites interaction.

What emerges is a tautological loop, but the loop is not circular—it is a spiral. Each turn deepens rather than repeats. The gesture returns, but never to the same place. The recursion is generative. It is the structure of thought itself.

In this spiral, painting becomes the subject of painting. And through it, the very origin of human language is summoned. If to speak is to name, then the first naming might have been visual, or at least have pointed to it. The mark preceded the word. Before metaphor, there was mimetic gesture. Before language described the world, painting engaged it.

To paint is to perform a reasoning—not to mimic it, but to re-enact it. It is not depiction but articulation. The gesture thinks. The surface listens. The pigment accumulates as language once did: slowly, rhythmically, redundantly, until meaning emerges not from the image but from its recurrence.

Language, like painting, is an invention that forgets it was invented. Its origins are buried in use, in the slow sediment of sound and symbol. It evolves not forward but outward, like breath against stone. Language is fossil poetry, as Emerson wrote—calcified metaphor. And in this body of work, the structure of that fossilization is rendered visible: through rhythm, through repetition, through the grain that carries not just the memory of the tree, but the condition of memory itself.

Each word, like each mark, is a gesture toward meaning. But the meaning is never stable. It flickers. It arrives through the friction between what is said and what is felt. This is why the thesis must speak in poetry. Not to decorate thought, but to enact it. To trace language as it moves—not as content, but as form.

Painting, then, is the prime invention. A prime object. In Kubler’s terms, it is the first term in a sequence of objects. Not because it was earliest, but because it remains unchanged. Sixty thousand years later, the hand still traces something of the mind.

The technology of painting persists in its fundamentality. It neither progresses nor obsolesces. It exists outside the temporal flow of utility. It is not used—it is returned to. As Professor Fox Hysen reminds us: painting is an object. And this object, unlike the tool or the device, contains no mechanism. It contains a moment. A painting is the memory of its making. It is not a record—it is an event. And when the substrate is wood, and the pigment is earth, and the form emerges from the grain itself, then the event is recursive. The painting is not about language—it is language.

Shadows and Origins

There is no beginning to the image—only a succession of first appearances. In Pliny’s account, the daughter of Butades traces her lover’s shadow on the wall before he departs. It is not a portrait, but a preservation—an attempt to hold onto time. Here, drawing is not invention but retention: a way of arresting the body as it leaves. This myth, as Hagi Kenaan suggests, does not tell us how painting began, but why it had to begin. It is born of loss, of memory, of the urge to formalize disappearance.

Lewis-Williams, in The Mind in the Cave, gives us another origin: not the personal, but the collective. He proposes that cave paintings emerged not as records of the world but as visions within it—hallucinatory, moving images animated by the dance of firelight across rock. These were not representations of animals or spirits, but encounters with them. The irregularities of the cave wall, shifting in light and shadow, transformed perception into vision, and vision into mark. The shadow, once again, is prior to the image—it is the image before the image.

Between these two accounts—one mythic, one archaeological—we find a continuity: shadow as the medium through which the body is externalized, abstracted, reconstituted in time.

In Takamatsu’s Shadow series, centuries later, the trace becomes literal. The shadow, once transient and flickering, is rendered in paint, made permanent. Yet this permanence introduces paradox. The painted shadow is fixed, while the object is gone. It is a reverse silhouette of Pliny’s story: a shadow without the lover. Takamatsu’s shadows are not cast but invented. They belong to no present moment, yet assert a reality of their own—what Kubler might call a “replication” in the sequence of formal solutions.

These references do not illustrate a history—they constitute one. Each moment is not a point on a timeline, but a phase in an evolving structure. The shadow as an abstract form, a bodily trace, a philosophical dilemma, and a visual solution reappears in each epoch, recast to meet the needs of its time.

Source

Fragments of a living,
breathing synthesizer
of breath—forever willing
to gain, and grow wiser—

sprout from a single seed,
rising to the occasion.
Rings accumulate with each
round around a common sun.

Trees do not throw shade,
even if uprooted or cut.
Trees, they still behave—
sentience forced shut.

A source of home, familiar.
The bark is drained and dried
of lifeblood, then ready to clear
out the irregularities—and unified,

a group of men, a large set
of machines, tirelessly churn.
Years of accumulation is met
with a sudden, irreversible turn.

Through the altered state,
something of its nature remains—
in the material of its fate,
written in the rings of its grain.

Cyclical, concentric is the language—
uneven, but the rings are still
numbers which account
for an age.

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.

Strate

Static and a Prelude
to the upcoming act,
of mute meaning—to elude
confusion in the abstract.

Painting a picture with words
in relation to sounds,
with gestures and swords,
with tense and nouns.

Musicality of rhythms,
pronounced, reached within
the limits and idioms
of letters—and pinning
meanings to visions.

Language pretends: who
understands? Who can say?
And has pronouns too,
to extrapolate hearsay—
events of importance
that may continue today.

Language is pretense,
resorting to succession,
overlapping of senses,
of memory and retention.

It is heard and spoken,
perceived with notions,
written and broken,
guarded—then opened.