Painting, the Virtual, and the Celluloid Frame

Abstract

This chapter discusses and progresses through an aesthetic enquiry into a relationship between the virtual and the actual surface of painting. It is through the inherent temporality of both painting and cinema that the notion of a dynamic duration is interrogated. At the core of this investigative methodology the philosophies of both Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze are employed to examine how duration in painting can be experienced outside of the static recollection. Fundamentally this follows Deleuze’s seminal writing about the cinematic and the function of the image in relation to time. The author accepts Deleuze’s invitation to employ his concepts as a toolbox for dynamism. Thus a model is assembled in which the notion of the “recollection-image” and its relationship to the temporality of the “movement-image” is developed through the potential of the figural as a space between the figurative and the abstract in painting.