Abstract
This introduction to Painting / Knowledge, an e-special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, maps 35 articles from the journal (and Body & Society) that position painting as a dynamic site of critical inquiry. Less a historical genre, the painterly is framed as an expansive field engaging theory, affect, embodiment, memory, and political aesthetics. Structured around four themes (Painting and the Political; Affect, Body, Gesture; Word, Image, Mediation; and Memory, Trauma, Image), the issue situates the articles in broader critical discourses, referencing thinkers such as Rancière, Lyotard, Deleuze, Krauss, and Foster. Painting emerges not as an autonomous medium but as a site where power, trauma, non-Western epistemologies, and sensory experience intersect. The painterly becomes a mode of critical engagement, rethinking visibility, affective knowledge, memory, and contestation. The issue reimagines painting’s place within the interdisciplinary landscape of critical theory, affirming its ongoing relevance as both expressive form and method of thought.
The painterly occupies a distinctive and enduring locus in the intersection of critical theory and visual culture. Understood both as a historically situated medium and as a constellation of theoretical problems, painting mediates between the domains of the sayable and the seeable, between discursive articulation and visual encounter. It traverses the thresholds of language and sensation, offering a field in which perception, affect, and material practice entangle. As Foucault (2009) suggests in his reading of Édouard Manet, painting is not merely representational but generates new regimes of visibility, thereby reorganising relations between knowledge, perception, and power. In this sense, painting can be understood as an epistemic site: it stages the conditions of appearance, the limits of what can be seen and known (Soussloff, 2017). The painterly, then, offers a prism through which to interrogate the shifting relations between image, body, memory, and social formation. It operates within the space that Jean-François Lyotard (2011) described as the ‘figural’: a mode that disrupts the dominance of discursive reason, introducing forces of displacement, slippage, and affect that elude linguistic capture. The figural speaks to a painterly capacity to stage what cannot be fully said or systematized; to expose and keep in play the tensions between visibility and discursivity that subtend modern and contemporary culture.
In the wake of what Krauss (2000) identifies as the ‘post-medium condition’, wherein traditional artistic categories are displaced by conceptual, performative, and technological practices, painting might seem a residual or marginal concern. Yet it is precisely the undoing of fixed media boundaries – of painting in the ‘expanded field’ (De Duve, 1996; Krauss, 1999) – that has allowed the medium to persist as a critical and continually redefined practice. Hence, rather than referring exclusively to the technique of painting or the material object of a painted canvas, the painterly designates a broader field of affects, gestures, textures, and temporalities that exceed medium-specific definitions. It names not merely a style but a mode of aesthetic and theoretical operation, one that cuts across practices and disciplines, and that implicates the body, memory, and the unconscious.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964: 159–60), in The Primacy of Perception, for example, locates painting at the crux of embodied perception, arguing that the painter ‘takes his body with him’ and renders visible the invisible threads of being. Similarly, Deleuze (2003 [1981]), in his readings of Francis Bacon, suggests that painting at its most vital captures ‘sensation’ – an intensive, non-representational force, rather than narrative or illustration. Cixous (2012), writing of the psychic labour of creation, attests to the ‘pain’ of painting: a corporeal and psychic inscription that resists closure, mastery, and domestication. These insights foreground the painterly not as a matter of figuration or depiction, but as a complex engagement with material intensities, affective thresholds, and bodily exposure.
With these considerations in mind, this e-special issue of Theory, Culture & Society gathers a selection of articles spanning several decades of the journal’s catalogue, along with contributions from Body & Society. Collected under the title of Painting/Knowledge, the articles remind us of the important presence of art, and specifically painting and painterly practices, within contemporary theory. Each contribution approaches painting not as an autonomous aesthetic object but as an unstable figure of mediation, wherein cultural, political, and sensory intensities converge. The articles are presented across the following four sections: Painting and the Political; Affect, Body, Gesture; Word, Image, Mediation; and Memory, Trauma, Image. The curatorial conceit is to argue not for a return to painting in any nostalgic or conservative sense, but rather for an expanded critical engagement with the painterly: as a dynamic site of contestation over the distribution of the visible (Rancière, 2004), as a staging of différance between text and image (Lyotard, 1985, 2011), as a persistent structure of bodily affect and social imagination (Foster, 1996, 2015). In mapping these trajectories, the issue seeks to demonstrate how the painterly continues to animate contemporary critical thought, and to pose urgent questions about what can be seen, said, and felt.
Painting and the Political
From classical oil on canvas to graffiti in the streets, painting has always been bound up with questions of visibility and power – what is seen, who gets to see it, and under what terms. As is much cited, Jacques Rancière (2004) argues that politics is founded on the ‘distribution of the sensible’, the partition of what is visible and sayable in a given order (Mirzoeff, 2011). Painting, in this sense, can destabilize or reinforce a regime of visibility. Several contributions in this issue explore this political dimension of the painterly, examining how images become sites of contestation, identification, or dissent.
Catherine Soussloff’s article, ‘Painting for Fools’, offers a pertinent entry point with a focus on Michel Foucault’s writings on art. Turning to Foucault’s notes from the 1960s on European ‘old master’ paintings and madness, Soussloff shows how painting figured into Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. He identifies in Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1490–1500) a visual logic of similitude and delirium that parallels his textual analysis in History of Madness (Foucault, 2006). Soussloff argues that Foucault’s encounter with the painterly – via Nietzsche, Sade, Bataille and others – was crucial in shaping his idea of the episteme of the visible. In effect, Foucault approached painting as a mode of thought, one that could reveal how a society sees its outsiders (the ‘fools’) and hence how power defines sanity, truth, and unreason. Soussloff’s title, ‘Painting for Fools’, ironically suggests that painting, often dismissed as irrational or opaque (‘for fools’), may harbour its own critical reason. Her excavation thus exemplifies the politics of visibility: canonical paintings become not just aesthetic objects but documents of historical regimes of seeing. In doing so, her study resonates with Rancière’s notion that art can rearrange what is perceptible in common sense – here, making visible the linkage between visual art and the governance of reason and madness.
John Lechte’s contribution, ‘Bataille: Image and Victim’, stays with the entanglement of image and power, but in a different register. Lechte revisits Georges Bataille’s (1985) visceral meditations on the image, particularly the notorious photograph of lingchi – the so-called ‘death by a thousand cuts’. While not about painting per se, Bataille’s ideas profoundly influenced postwar art theory, e.g. his concept of l’informe, the formless (Bataille, 1998; Bois and Krauss, 1997). Lechte analyses how, for Bataille, the image harbours an excess that can both enthrall and wound. The viewer becomes a kind of victim of what they see. This dramatization of viewing implicates the politics of images: an image might transgress social norms, confronting us with violence or taboo (as many modern paintings have). The painterly here is aligned with sacrifice and transgression; a tearing of the veil of ordinary visibility. In Bataille, then, Lechte highlights a theme that recurs across this issue: images are not neutral; they have the capacity to unsettle the division between the visible and the invisible, often at some psychic or ethical cost.
The avant-garde movements of the 20th century knew well that painting could be political – sometimes all too political. ‘The Artist to Power?: Futurism, Fascism and the Avant-Garde’, by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, examines the troubling liaison between Italian Futurist art and fascist politics. Here the question is turned on its head: not what politics does to art, but what art aspires to do to politics. The Futurists exalted speed, technology, and violence; painting was to leap off the canvas and into life – indeed Marinetti’s manifestos called for art that literally explodes in the streets (Apollonio, 1973). Falasca-Zamponi charts how this avant-garde dream of merging art and power slid into the embrace of Mussolini’s regime. The painterly, in the Futurist case, became a vehicle for a new political aesthetic, one that ultimately served authoritarian spectacle. This historical episode provides a cautionary counterpoint to more emancipatory views: the politics of visibility can cut both ways. Just as painting can resist dominant orders, it can also aestheticise power, seducing mass opinion through mythic images of nation or leader. Falasca-Zamponi invites us to reflect on the ambivalent legacy of the avant-garde’s political engagements: the desire to reshape the sensible fabric of society can align with radical democracy (as in some Dada or Situationist pranks) or with reactionary myth-making.
Of course, Futurism, Dada and Situationism typically situate within a Western art history discourse, which, indeed, for too long centred on a Western narrative – whether the Italian Renaissance, Parisian modernism or the New York avant-garde. One of the aims of this e-special is to broaden the lens, showcasing analysis that takes seriously practices and discourses beyond the Western canon, as well as those that situate European art in transnational or colonial contexts. It is testament to the broader purview of Theory, Culture & Society that we can travel across cultures and continents, examining how the meaning of painting (and the very notion of the painterly) shifts when viewed through a global or comparative frame. The remaining articles grouped in this section challenge a parochial definition of painting, exploring indigenous Australian, East Asian and Middle Eastern contexts, and highlighting interactions and power imbalances between centres and peripheries. They function as a kind of cartography, mapping out a pluralistic world of painting. As Foster (1996: 171–203) notes, the figure of the artist as ethnographer has been a feature of contemporary art from the 1980s onwards, when artists turned to the ‘Other’ and cultural difference as subject matter, which was not without its problems. Here, however, we have scholars seeking to reverse that gaze, examining non-Western art on its own terms and/or turning the theoretical tools developed in the West back onto Western art itself, giving a different perspective.
Jon Stratton’s ‘Landscapes: Central and Western Desert Paintings and the Discourse of Art’ offers a study of Australian Aboriginal Western Desert paintings (by Indigenous artists from central Australia) to present a specific East/West encounter. In the 1970s, Aboriginal artists began using acrylic on canvas to depict Dreaming stories (previously drawn on sand or bodies). These works entered the global art market, sparking debate as to their status (were they ‘fine art’ or anthropological artifacts?). Stratton examines how Western art discourse assimilated these paintings as ‘abstract art’ akin to modernism (with their dots and seemingly non-figurative patterns), while sometimes downplaying their cultural meanings (sacred narratives, cartographic maps of country). He discusses the exhibitions and critical reception that framed these works. The concept of ‘landscape’ here is fraught: for the desert painters, the canvas is not representing a landscape in the Western sense; it is a landscape – a site of ancestral presence and a means of connecting to land. When these are called ‘paintings’, a whole Western apparatus of galleries, ownership, signatures, and monetary value comes into play, at odds with the communal and ceremonial context of their creation.
It is worth noting that Stratton’s article can be usefully paired with Feuchtwang’s ‘François Jullien’s Landscape, Site Selection, and Pattern Recognition’, which appears in the later section, ‘Word, Image, Mediation’. As will be outlined, Feuchtwang engages with the philosopher François Jullien, who has written incisively about how Chinese landscape aesthetics differ from European. Jullien (2000) argues, for example, that concepts like composition, perspective, and even landscape do not translate neatly. Chinese painters traditionally approached nature not as a scene to be dissected by the eye, but as a living process to be attuned to. The practice of site selection in Chinese garden design or painting involves cosmology and energy flows (feng shui, qi) more than picturesque views. Feuchtwang draws attention to meaningful configurations (of rocks, water, mist) that resonate with Daoist or poetic ideas. Together, Feuchtwang and Stratton remind us that place and space have painterly representations that are culturally (and politically) specific. The global perspective forces theory to accommodate concepts like country (in the Aboriginal sense) or shanshui (mountain-water painting) which do not fit into the Greco-European lineage of landscape. Feuchtwang and Stratton, then, offer salutary expansion and decentering of the gaze.
Mona Abaza’s
Of course, art’s political charge is not confined to overt depictions of revolt. It can also lie in subtler negotiations of identity and order. Martijn Oosterbaan and Rivke Jaffe’s ‘Popular Art, Crime and Urban Order Beyond the State’ shifts the focus to urban visual culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. Their article investigates forms of street art, tattoo, and graphic expressions emerging in contexts of weak state authority, such as gang-controlled neighborhoods or informal communities. Here, painting (in the expanded sense) operates as a vernacular language of order and dissent outside official institutions. Murals may mark a gang’s territory but also beautify and give identity to marginalized areas; certain images become talismans of protection or defiance in a landscape where state law is absent. Oosterbaan and Jaffe show how these visual practices negotiate power in a grey zone beyond the reach of the state – effectively a politics of visibility from below. Their analysis, ‘beyond the state’, suggests wherever formal governance recedes, aesthetic ordering rushes in: images, signs, and symbols assume roles in regulating behaviour, asserting community, or contesting hierarchy. Their account also complicates Eurocentric narratives of public art and policing, adding a Global South perspective in which the painterly is entwined with alternative forms of sovereignty and social control. The account, again, echoes Foster’s (1996: 171–203) observation that contemporary artists often act as ethnographers, engaging with subcultures and marginal spaces. Here, however, it is the community members themselves who act as artists-anthropologists of their own condition, using visual creativity to make sense of, or impose sense on, a precarious social world.
The nexus of painting, war, and surveillance enters our purview with Paul K. Saint-Amour’s ‘Applied Modernism: Military and Civilian Uses of the Aerial Photomosaic’. This article reveals another face of the politics of visibility: the technologies of seeing deployed by states and militaries. Saint-Amour recounts how aerial photography and photomosaic mapping were pioneered during the First World War, developments that paralleled Cubist collage and modernist montage in the art world. Here picture-making intersects with governmentality: pieces of photographic images are assembled into a mosaic to reveal enemy landscapes from above. These photomaps, while not paintings, were crafted compositions, often assembled by artists drafted into war service. Saint-Amour demonstrates that techniques of modern art and modern reconnaissance informed one another. The implication is that, despite claims of the objective realm of surveillance, aesthetic decisions (how to stitch images, how to interpret patterns) play a key role. The aerial view gave states a powerful new visual mastery: the power to see without being seen. Yet modernist artists swiftly appropriated the god’s-eye view to deconstruct vision, as in Picasso’s fractured planes or the Dadaists’ photo-collages. By examining this convergence, the article underscores that the politics of visibility operates not only on the ground (in what murals or paintings represent) but also in the very means of visualization. Vision itself can be weaponized or resisted. In our present context of drones and satellite imagery (Fish, 2022; Fish and Richardson, 2021), these questions are ever more salient, making Saint-Amour’s historical analysis a prescient reminder that to control the field of vision is to exercise power.
Ayelet Zohar’s ‘The Paintings of Ibrahim Nubani: Camouflage, Schizophrenia and Ambivalence – Eight Fragments’ provides a case study of an individual artist navigating the fraught politics of identity and visibility in a conflict zone. Nubani, a Palestinian-Israeli painter, employs abstraction and camouflage patterns in his work. Zohar interprets his paintings as layered negotiations of an ‘ambivalent’ identity – simultaneously revealing and concealing. The motif of camouflage is telling: it is a technique of hiding in plain sight. Nubani’s painterly gestures blur outlines and blend figures into backgrounds, metaphorically invoking the predicament of a minority artist within a hostile or indifferent state. His work asks: How does one paint one’s identity when that identity is politically stigmatized or rendered invisible? Zohar’s analysis shows Nubani drawing on global modernist styles (Abstract Expressionism, etc.) but infusing them with a local political charge. The painterly surface in his case becomes a battleground between visibility and invisibility, a strategy as much as an aesthetic. By titling one of his series ‘Schizophrenia’, Nubani explicitly thematizes the split experience of self, and painting becomes the medium to register that split without resolving it. Zohar’s fragmentary exposition mirrors the fragmentary nature of Nubani’s art, underscoring that the politics of the image can be profoundly personal. This article thus connects back to the larger theme: whether in broad social movements or an artist’s internal struggle, the act of painting can make visible what is otherwise unseen or suppressed – or conversely, comment on the impossibility of being visibly recognized in a given political order.
Finally, the section turns toward a posthuman politics with Thomas Macho’s ‘Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification’. Macho explores the symbolic and representational techniques that humans use to distinguish themselves from animals – a distinction deeply rooted in visual culture. His notion of ‘second-order’ animals refers not simply to animals as depicted, but to animals as signs within signs: totemic emblems, heraldic beasts, scientific diagrams, or cinematic doubles, representations of representations that help structure human identity (cf. Descola, 2013). Such second-order images are not merely illustrations but cultural techniques that recursively depict identity as it is being mediated, classified, or performed. Macho’s argument connects to painting in the expanded sense: not only traditional portraiture (such as humans posed with pets to denote civility or status), but also through death masks, caricature, biometric photography, and other image-making practices that operate as ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, 1988). Particularly compelling is how Macho shows that visual media – whether in the form of colonial portraiture, ID papers, or even signature styles – become apparatuses of both selfhood and subjugation. He outlines how practices of depiction (especially those that distinguish the human from the animal) carry ideological weight, structuring who is seen as fully human and who is not. Hence, Macho’s analysis opens the painterly to broader cultural techniques of visual inscription and categorisation. The line between human and animal, drawn in everything from cave art to biometric scans, is itself a visual act, a kind of cultural drawing. A global, posthuman perspective on painting must include these ideological and technical image regimes – attuned to a recursive practice where images do not just show, but classify, legitimize, and perform identities. In doing so, Macho challenges the Western humanist tradition, showing its dependence on visual mediations that are anything but neutral.
Affect, Body, Gesture
Painting has often been described as a form of thinking through the body – a gestural and affective language that precedes words. As Deleuze (2003: 40) writes in his study of Francis Bacon: ‘The task of painting is defined as the attempt to render visible forces that are not themselves visible’. By force, he means sensation: ‘for a sensation to exist, a force must be exerted on a body’. In this passage, Deleuze is making direct reference to Paul Klee’s well-known formula: ‘Not to render the visible, but to render visible’ – which Deleuze takes to confirm that ‘no art is figurative’ – art is not referential, but embodied. In this section, the focus shifts to the embodied and affective dimensions of the painterly. Hence, we can ask: How do paintings convey force, feeling, and the traces of the body? How do viewers respond on a visceral level? And how might the act of painting itself be a performance of the body, entangled with gender, identity, and even neuroscience? The articles grouped here explore these questions, many of them drawing on psychoanalytic and poststructuralist frameworks (including Deleuze’s own thought) to theorize the connection between art and embodied experience.
A central reference point for discussions of affect in art is the work of painter-psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, whose concept of the matrixial gaze affords productive ways of thinking about feminine subjectivity, trauma, and art. Two articles in this issue engage directly with Ettinger. Griselda Pollock’s ‘Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis’ is a comprehensive introduction to Ettinger’s theoretical art practice. Pollock positions Ettinger’s painting (often abstract, with ethereal overlays and blurry figures) as an aesthetic tuning into trans-subjective affect – specifically, the shared, prenatal space of the maternal that Ettinger calls the matrixial. Painting here becomes a working-through of trauma and memory that is not solely the artist’s own but is carried in a communal, feminine dimension of experience. The painterly gesture in Ettinger’s work, Pollock explains, is less about assertive mark-making and more about encounters and transformations (metramorphoses) between self and other (cf. Kristeva, 1984, regarding semiotic forces that unsettle the symbolic order and open up pre-linguistic zones of meaning). This shifts focus from the heroic, masculine painter-genius myth toward a relational, empathic model of creation (cf. écriture feminine, Cixous, 1976; and ‘inclined language’, Cavarero, 2013; Rozas, 2021). The embodied dimension is paramount: Ettinger’s canvases bear traces of touch and layering that mirror psychological processes of bonding, loss, and attachment. Pollock’s essay thus illuminates how painting can function as an affective matrix – a space where feelings that have no name (pre-Oedipal, pre-linguistic) find expression in colour and texture.
Judith Butler’s shorter commentary, ‘Bracha’s Eurydice’, offers a philosophical riff on one of Ettinger’s paintings, based upon the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Butler reflects on Ettinger’s reversal of the myth: Eurydice (usually unseen, in shadow) comes to represent the feminine dimension that Ettinger’s art seeks to keep in sight without ‘killing’ it by exposure. In Orpheus’s story, the gaze is fatal: he turns to look at Eurydice and loses her forever. Ettinger, by contrast, proposes a matrixial gaze that does not appropriate or objectify the other, but co-exists with her in a shared space of creativity. Butler’s poetic meditation ties this to an ethics of looking: a painterly approach that resists the dominating gaze and instead accommodates the delicate, the ephemeral – the unseen within the seen. Although theoretical, this speaks to the affective power of painting: the ability of an image to hold loss and love in tension, to let the viewer feel the presence of an absence.
Pollock and Butler, through Ettinger, articulate a vision of painting as an affective practice, informed by body, gender, and trauma. Lone Bertelsen’s ‘Matrixial Refrains’ further deepens the theoretical reach of the matrixial by framing it as a dynamic refrain – a rhythmic and recursive structure that creates time, opens paths for new subjectivities, and grounds an existential ethic of co-affectivity. Drawing on both Ettinger and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 310–50) reading of the refrain, Bertelsen shows how matrixial aesthetics operate not just within individual artworks but across serial practices, generating affective fields where trauma, memory, and relationality co-emerge. Importantly, she emphasizes the inseparability of the symbolic and the material, arguing that Ettinger’s mixed-media ‘paintings’ – including photo-based, reworked documents – render visible not what has been represented, but what has yet to find form: trauma, the feminine, and the unknown other (painting’s relationship to trauma is developed further in the final section of this collection, ‘Memory, Trauma, Image’). Notably, Bertelsen extends matrixial aesthetics beyond painting proper, suggesting that Ettinger’s practice is a means of wit(h)nessing – i.e. a shared, intersubjective encounter with that which resists representation. Her reading underscores how matrixial refrains act as affective connectors, allowing what is unseen or unspeakable to pass into presence, if only in fragmentary, grainy, or blurred form. This movement, she argues, transforms not only the image but the subject, allowing for a politics and poetics of becoming.
The haptic and tactile in visual art might be said to possess a form of ‘skin’. In ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and La Peau des images: Truth is Skin-deep’, Christina Howells engages with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s metaphor of the image as skin. Nancy suggests that the truth of an image lies in its surface – its skin – which both touches and separates. The image is like a body: it has a skin that makes contact with the world (and the viewer) while also covering an interior. To say ‘truth is skin-deep’ is paradoxical – it means we should not look through images for deeper meaning, but rather experience the surface itself as truth. As Howells notes, this aligns with a shift in recent aesthetics toward materiality and affect over symbol and narrative. In painting, of course, skin is everywhere: the painted canvas is often analogized to human skin (with scars of brushstrokes, wrinkles of craquelure, etc.), and artists from Leonardo to Newman have treated the painted surface as a field of embodied presence. Howells, via Nancy, provides a philosophical framework for understanding why standing before a painting is a physical encounter – as if the painting’s skin and our own skin are in silent communion. This tactile vision of the painterly connects to haptic visuality, outlined by Deleuze (2003: 85, 92) when discussing Bacon’s work, where the eye functions like a touching hand, registering texture, thickness, and gesture.
Expanding the conceptual frame of embodiment and affect through a non-Western frame, Peng Yu’s ‘Zones of Indeterminacy: Art, Body and Politics in Daoist Thought’ brings Daoist thought – particularly Zhuangzi’s concept of Xu – into dialogue with contemporary art theory. Xu denotes a relational emptiness or blandness that resists fixed structures, offering a politics of indeterminacy. For Yu, this has implications for how we understand the artistic body – not as a stable, expressive subject but as a porous, shape-shifting site of mutual becoming. Drawing on the aesthetics of liubai (leaving blankness) in traditional Chinese ink painting, Yu shows how absence can generate dynamic relations and open up a space for transformation. His analysis aligns with affect theory and haptic visuality but shifts the emphasis from intensification to diffusion and mutual engendering. In an accompanying interview, ‘Zones of Indeterminacy: An Interview with Peng Yu’, with Sunil Manghani and Cheng-Chu Weng, Yu elaborates how Xu disrupts dualisms like form/void, self/other, and centre/periphery, suggesting that painting (and the body itself) may be understood to operate as a zone of emergence rather than expression. Through the notion of Xu, the painterly becomes not only somatic but cosmological: a diagram of becoming that reimagines political agency as fluid, relational, and ultimately indeterminate (for more on the cosmological, see the contribution from Yuk Hui, in the next section, ‘Word, Image, Mediation’).
Returning to the reference point of Deleuze (from Howells’ article), Henning Schmidgen’s ‘Cerebral Drawings between Art and Science: On Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Concepts’ offers a bridge between embodied art and abstract thought, with consideration of Deleuze’s notion that creating concepts is akin to drawing. Deleuze and Guattari (1994) in What is Philosophy? liken concepts to aesthetic objects and speak of a philosopher’s ‘canvas’. Schmidgen explores, specifically, how Deleuze used diagrams and sketches (for instance, the chaotic ‘diagram’ in his analysis of Francis Bacon’s method) to articulate his ideas. Schmidgen blurs the line between the literal painterly gesture and the figurative intellectual gesture: to think is to draw lines, to connect points – a cerebral but also manual activity. One might recall Deleuze’s (2003: 72) remark that Bacon introduces chaos into the canvas through random strokes – ‘the diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm’. This offers a metaphor for creative thought. Schmidgen’s study underscores that even in the realm of high theory, the painterly persists as method and metaphor. The body (the brain, the hand) is implicated in concept-work. This suggests a kinship between artistic and intellectual labour. Both require a play of control and surrender, precision and accident, much like the dance of the painter’s hand on the surface. By examining Deleuze’s own ‘drawings’ of concepts, Schmidgen reinforces a theme of this section: the inseparability of mind, body, and art. Every line drawn – whether on paper, canvas, or in thought – is the trace of a living, desiring body engaging the world.
Two contributions bring the discussion of affect and gesture into the realm of performance and participatory practice, again expanding the painterly beyond painting proper. Nicole de Brabandere’s ‘Experimenting with Affect across Drawing and Choreography’ is a cross-disciplinary study. De Brabandere collaborates with dancers, using drawing as a medium to capture movement and affect. Hence, drawing (a form of mark-making closely related to painting) becomes a kind of notation and extension of dance – lines on paper emerging from bodily motion and, conversely, drawings influencing how dancers move. This recursive experiment literalizes the notion of embodied image: the dancer’s gestures produce graphic traces, which in turn elicit new bodily responses. De Brabandere’s work is exemplary of how contemporary art practices break down silos: choreography becomes a way to draw in space, and drawing becomes movement on a page. The affects – intensities of feeling or energy – are ‘caught’ not only in the dancers’ bodies but in the lines and smudges generated. As per the painterly, this suggests that the essence of painting might reside not in pigment on canvas, but in the transmissible forces it harnesses. Whether through a moving body or a moving brush, the affective charge is what is being composed. De Brabandere, influenced by affect theory and Deleuzian ideas of sensation, demonstrates art-making as an open, processual event shared between bodies and images.
In a similar vein, ‘Interview: Cynthia Imogen Hammond and Marc Lafrance on Drawings for a Thicker Skin’ is an opportunity for a discussion of an art project where drawing becomes a medium of social engagement and healing. Hammond and Lafrance’s project invited participants to draw on translucent surfaces or on each other’s skin, exploring themes of vulnerability, boundary, and contact. The notion of a ‘thicker skin’ speaks to resilience against social harm (as responses to body shaming or marginalization), achieved through a collaborative drawing ritual. By literally (and metaphorically) putting pencil to skin, this practice locates the painterly gesture on the body of the participant. It’s a powerful inversion: rather than the artist alone making marks on a static surface, here the living surface of skin is inscribed, implicating trust and intimacy. The interview explores how this interactive drawing exercise generated affective responses – a mix of discomfort, empowerment, solidarity. In tying drawing to skin emphatically, Hammond and Lafrance also echo Nancy’s idea of image-skin, but take it further to suggest that through art we might grow a new skin (thicker, more resilient). It’s an example of socially engaged art where the boundary between art and life blurs; the painterly becomes therapeutic, a mode of care for the embodied self.
Finally, in concluding this section, the body of the spectator should not be forgotten. Christian Heath and Dirk vom Lehn’s ‘Configuring Reception: (Dis-)Regarding the “Spectator” in Museums and Galleries’ reminds us that meaning in art is co-produced by viewers physically moving, looking, and interacting (or not) in the gallery space. Their ethnographic observations of people in museums reveal the patterns of attention, gesture, and conversation that constitute the reception of art. They critique the art world’s often implicit model of a passive, disembodied spectator and show that real viewers lean in, step back, point, discuss, or sometimes ignore artworks, all in patterned ways. This connects to Rancière’s (2009: 16–17) idea of the emancipated spectator: ‘in a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum . . . there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs’. Viewers are not blank slates; they actively navigate the exhibition, each creating a unique trajectory of sense-making. Heath and vom Lehn’s study, in the context of this study, re-emphasizes that the affective, embodied dimension of art includes the viewer too. The painterly gesture doesn’t conclude with the artist’s final stroke; it continues in the micro-gestures of the audience, the widened eyes, the gasps, the furrowed brow, the turned away body. The museum is a choreography of bodies in its own right. By ‘dis-regarding’ the generic spectator and regarding actual people, this article grounds theoretical explorations in the concrete behaviours of how art is experienced: by embodied beings whose perceptions and emotions are in play. It dovetails with the ethos of this section: art is a corporeal event as much as a visual image.
Various threads are drawn together in this section relating to painting (and art more broadly) as a somatic affair – from Ettinger’s matrix of shared affect, to de Kooning’s faltering yet persistent hand, to Nancy’s image-skin, to Deleuze’s nervous vibrations, to participatory drawing performances. We see the painterly not as a detached optical object but as a web of gestures and sensations, what Schefer (2003) might call the enigmatic presence of the body in representation, at once material and elusive. Painting emerges as encounter: between bodies, between artist and medium, between image and viewer. If modern aesthetics once treated paintings as self-contained worlds of form and content, contemporary theory insists we also attend to the fleshly, time-bound processes that produce and receive these forms. The painterly, as these authors would attest, is not solely in iconography or composition, but in how painting moves us and moves through us. In the dance of eyes and hands that create and appreciate art, new forms of knowledge – tactile, emotional, unconscious – become possible. The painterly thus blurs into life itself, its affective reverberations extending well beyond the frame.
Word, Image, Mediation
One of the enduring questions in aesthetics and cultural theory is the relationship between images and language. Painting often stands as the paradigmatic visual art, seemingly opposed to the verbal. Writers from Lessing to Barthes have wrestled with how the two realms meet and diverge (Manghani, 2016; Mitchell, 1986: 95–115). In ‘Colouring, Degree Zero’, Roland Barthes reflects on his modest yet sustained practice of painting, which he describes not as art per se but as ‘colouring’ – an amateur, affective gesture that exists outside the traps of language. Best known for his writings on language, semiotics, and the structures of meaning, Barthes’ turn to ‘colouring’ can be understood as a deliberate form of respite from the very systems he spent a career analysing. This fragment, rich in his signature blend of self-awareness and semiotic insight, locates colouring as a form of mediated pleasure: a bodily act that eludes classification, aesthetic mastery, and linguistic responsibility. For Barthes, the gesture of applying colour becomes a way of engaging with image and text not through representation, but through tactile presence and ephemeral sensation. In the context of this section, his text invites us to consider the unspoken, the unschooled, and the interstitial as sites of both resistance and joy. More broadly, we can ask: Does a painting speak, and if so, how? Can words adequately capture visual experience, or do they inevitably betray it? Is there a ‘border’ between word and image that can be crossed or must be observed? (Manghani, 2013: 59–87).
Boris Groys’s ‘The Border between Word and Image’ is a fitting anchor point. Groys argues that the boundary between visual and verbal art ‘can neither be stabilised nor erased; it is constantly negotiated’ (Abdullah and Benzer in Dawes, 2011; see also: Abdullah and Benzer, 2011). Informed by examples of contemporary art that incorporate text (think of graffiti, concept art, installations with audio), Groys challenges any strict partition of sensory domains. Historically, as he notes, the emphasis was on the specificities of word and image, notably with Lessing (1984 [1766]) in Laocoön, who sought to define painting and poetry as distinct in essence: the former concerned with space and forms, the latter with time and actions. But modern and contemporary practices have defied a neat split. Consider, for example, the scribbled words upon the canvases of Cy Twombly (Barthes, 1985: 157–94), or Barbara Kruger’s text-over-image works (Owens, 1983: 75–7), as well as a number of multimedia installations. Groys analyses how the introduction of language into visual art is not just a Duchampian ready-made gesture; it points to a deeper linguistic desire within the image itself. Even a painting with no letters or words, he suggests, is haunted by the discourse around it (e.g. titles, interpretations, theory). Conversely, words, when presented visually, take on aesthetic qualities (typography, layout, etc.). Groys’s insight that the border is constantly renegotiated sets the stage for appreciating how the articles in this cluster see painting as a site of translation and tension between seeing and saying (echoing concerns in the opening section, ‘Painting and the Political’).
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s text, ‘Artworks in Word and Image: “So True, So Full of Being!” (Goethe)’, provides a philosophical perspective from the hermeneutic tradition. Gadamer was interested in how art communicates truth, and here he meditates on the interplay of word and image via a Goethe quote. This account is situated, then, centuries earlier, to consider how poetry and painting strived, each in their way, to capture reality (‘so true, so full of being!’ exclaims Goethe upon seeing an artwork). Gadamer argues that both word and image are modes of understanding the world, and each has its strengths. Painting can present the singular and the sensible in a way language cannot; yet language can make explicit and sharable what painting shows only intuitively. The ‘word-image’ relation in Gadamer’s view is complementary rather than antagonistic. His hermeneutics suggests that to interpret a painting is not to translate image into word mechanically, but to enter into dialogue with the work – a fusion of horizons between visual experience and linguistic meaning. In the context of this e-special issue, Gadamer’s contribution reminds us that the debate of word and image is not merely of recent interest (e.g. with the emergence of visual culture studies); it has been an enduring concern and remains crucial in understanding art’s significance. Gadamer’s emphasis on truth and being also adds a normative dimension, i.e. beyond formal or political aspects, we can ask if there is something truthful that a painting conveys which a written theory might affirm or struggle to articulate.
The modernist tradition often viewed writing about painting as a kind of betrayal, hence the credo ‘painting speaks for itself’. Yet by the mid-20th century, this resistance gave way to practices in which language, theory, and self-reflexivity became integral to the artwork itself. Celia Lury’s ‘“Contemplating a Self-Portrait as a Pharmacist”: A Trade Mark Style of Doing Art and Science’ offers a reading of how this transformation plays out in the work of Damien Hirst, whose oeuvre complicates the boundaries of painting, authorship, and mediation. Hirst is revealed not simply as an artist but as a brand – ‘a trade mark style’ – where the visual and textual converge within the circuits of contemporary capitalism. Her title references Hirst’s work Contemplating a Self-Portrait (as a Pharmacist) (1998), a steel and glass box containing an artist’s easel and painting implements, which is often shown with Hirst’s installation of pharmacy shelves. Contemplating a Self-Portrait is ‘painting’ by other means: the traditional canvas is sealed, unattended, within a glass container (a cross between a self-storage unit and museum exhibition). It seems a long way from Hirst’s well-known spot paintings, yet an interest in surfaces, composition and loss of affect persists. As Lury notes, the spot paintings, produced by assistants and governed by formulaic repetition, are not unique artefacts but serial, almost industrial productions. Yet they remain painterly only in their preoccupation with colour, optical vibration, and surface effects. Hirst himself has said of the spot paintings: ‘The moment they stop, they start to rot and stink’. They are alive through their proliferation. This invocation of life, so central to Hirst’s rhetoric, is what Lury isolates as key to his brand identity: not originality, but living-ness – ‘life as it is lived’. The artist becomes less a singular origin and more a node in a network of relations; the signature becomes a logo. Similarly, as Lury notes, Hirst’s pharmacist-self draws on the visual authority of scientific and commercial systems. His vitrines – filled with formaldehyde-preserved animals or carefully arranged pills – are laboratory displays, not studio canvases. Yet, they are also acts of composition, steeped in colour theory and spatial orchestration. This is Hirst as post-medium painter, composing not with oil and brush but with objects, brand names, and institutional formats. His art lives within catalogues, press releases, and magazine spreads; it demands to be read as much as viewed. Understanding Hirst, then, requires understanding this interdiscursive logic. Painting here is not betrayed by writing – it is made through it. The canvas becomes a language system.
System can be considered in other ways too. A series of texts in this section consider the mediation of art, particularly as it is encountered in the curated space of a gallery or exhibition. Two historical texts (from 1913) by Georg Simmel speak to this: writing in the early 20th century, he addressed art’s social and spatial framing in ways that remain prescient. ‘On Art Exhibitions’ is a brief essay where Simmel reflects on how the gallery or exhibition context influences the meaning of artworks. He notes, for instance, that putting art in a row or grouping by artist/genre imposes a narrative or comparative lens that is not intrinsic to the works. Simmel was sensitive to the form of the exhibition itself, anticipating today’s ‘curatorial studies’. He observes that an ‘ideal’ exhibition creates a dialogue between pieces without overwhelming them, whereas a bad hang can distort perception (too crowded, or over-contextualized by didactic panels). Though Simmel wrote before conceptual art, his insights foreshadow our understanding that seeing art is always mediated by institutional and spatial arrangements (White Cube gallery, salon-style hanging, etc.), which are themselves a language.
Simmel’s ‘Philosophy of Landscape’ goes deeper into how concepts mediate perception. Here, he muses on what it means to view ‘landscape’ – not just nature, but nature as framed in art or in one’s mental image (cf. Rancière, 2023). He notes that landscape as an idea was born with modernity. Earlier periods saw nature as a chaotic whole or as symbolic scenes, but the modern eye (and the landscape painter) isolates a portion of nature, composing it as a harmonious picture. This philosophical observation implies that even what we think of as raw visual experience (admiring a sunset) is shaped by aesthetic concepts and perhaps by art itself (we see landscapes partly through the eyes of artists who painted them). When paired with contemporary pieces like Stephan Feuchtwang’s ‘François Jullien’s Landscape, Site Selection, and Pattern Recognition’, which contrasts Chinese and Western ways of conceptualizing landscape, we get a rich discussion: Simmel’s European idea of landscape as a distinct aesthetic object versus the Chinese tradition where landscape (shanshui) painting follows different principles (e.g. multiple perspectives, integration of calligraphy/poetry, a cosmological view). Feuchtwang, via Jullien, notes that Chinese painters historically chose sites not for singular picturesque unity but for resonant qi (energy) and layered meaning; their ‘pattern recognition’ was attuned to different values. Thus, word and image intertwine: Chinese landscape names and poetic inscriptions guide the viewer’s eye through a scroll, mediating the image in a way alien to the West. These comparisons highlight that the word-image problem is also cultural. What Simmel took as universal (the modern landscape as concept) is provincial from a global view. The painterly in one culture might always include words (think of the seals and poems on a Chinese scroll painting), whereas in another it strives to exclude them (modernist abstraction’s purity). This intercultural theorization is developed further with Ty’s (2023) reading of Benjamin’s dialectics through Daoist philosophy, proposing a renewal of Western critical categories via non-linear, processual logics of resemblance.
Shiqiao Li’s ‘Language, Figure, Landscape in Chinese Thought’ offers further evidence of the significance of cultural context. He examines the triad of language (word), figure (image/form), and landscape in Chinese intellectual history. He traces, for example, how classical Chinese thought (Confucianism, Daoism) did not separate poetry, calligraphy, and painting, as was the case in the West. A scholar was ideally conversant in all three arts (the ‘Three Perfections’ of painting, poetry, calligraphy as considered to coexist in a single scroll). He explicates the concepts of wen (writing/culture) and hua (painting), whereby Chinese aesthetics sees writing as painting (calligraphy as the highest visual art) and painting as a kind of writing (with pictographic roots or characters). The idea of figure in Chinese art is more fluid (figures blend into landscape without Western linear perspective or shading). By bringing language into the analysis of Chinese landscape painting, Li echoes previous entries in this section, but in a non-Western key. He demonstrates that the relation of text and image is not a uniquely Western problematic, but nonetheless manifests differently. In Chinese scrolls, the artist’s poem inscribed on the painting is part of the composition; rather than a wall label, the text is literally on the image. This collapses the border described by Groys, and which has been normalized in China for centuries. Thus, Li’s insights reinforce the point that categories like ‘visual’ and ‘verbal’ art are themselves cultural constructs.
The final two entries in this section bring us to more recent debates of mediation and disciplinary framing. Jeannine Tang’s ‘The Big Bang at Centre Georges Pompidou: Reconsidering Thematic Curation’ reviews a Pompidou Centre exhibition, Le Big Bang (2005), that boldly rearranged the museum’s modern art collection by themes (e.g. Chaos, Sex, War) rather than chronologically or by movements. This curatorial experiment functioned like writing a new text with the artworks, making them illustrations of concepts. Tang critically examines the consequences: does such thematic staging illuminate unexpected connections, or does it force artworks into a Procrustean bed of curatorial narrative? For example, a Picasso and a Nam June Paik installation can both appear under ‘Chaos’, implying a kinship that traditional art history would not typically acknowledge. Tang’s analysis underscores curation as a discipline, and as an act of mediation that parallels writing; it is akin to authoring an essay in space with artworks as the ‘words’. In doing so, meaning is generated not just by each piece but by their juxtaposition and the assigned rubric. Le Big Bang thus becomes a case of word/image interplay at the institutional level. Tang’s discussion confirms Simmel’s earlier view that how we encounter painting (individually or in groups, under certain titles) profoundly shapes our interpretation. It recalls Groys’s point that even when seeing an image alone, we are aware of an implicit archive or context – the exhibition just makes that context explicit and didactic.
This section closes with a more expansive, philosophical take on mediation, bringing us up-to-date with a post-digital discourse. The title of Yuk Hui’s ‘On the Varieties of Experience of Art’ echoes James’s (1902) Varieties of Religious Experience, presaging Hui’s interest in the phenomenology of art, in a pluralistic fashion. Hui, known for his work on technology and Chinese philosophy, is concerned with how different media (painting, digital art, etc.) produce different modes of experience, and how art as experience is evolving with technology. He contrasts the experience of art in a traditional museum with interactive art or AI-generated art. Offering a different kind of take on word and image, he stresses that our engagement with art is increasingly mediated by information (art becomes data; even in how we read about art online, share images with captions, etc.). Thus, Hui multiplies the layers of interpretation. The experience becomes not just retinal (to use Duchamp’s critical term), nor just cognitive, but also networked – hence a mix of seeing, reading, and navigating. Hui’s account resonates with the preceding texts by again implicitly asking: can we still isolate a pure visual experience when art comes entwined with theory, navigates a global context, and is received through multimedia channels? His blend of Western and Eastern philosophical references (notably Heidegger, but also, for example, Chinese aesthetic notions of jing (境), the scene) broaden how we conceive the art encounter. Advocating what he calls ‘cosmotechnics’ (Hui, 2016), merging cosmology and technology across cultures, Hui’s inclusion is an important reminder that the mediation of art through concepts and words is not a form of containment but an opening, enabling multiple varieties of experience rather than one canonical mode.
Memory, Trauma, Image
Across the preceding themes runs an undercurrent that surfaces more fully in this final section: the relationship between images, memory, the liminal, and trauma. Painting (and visual art more broadly) has long served as a vessel of remembrance, from the grand narratives of historical battle scenes and commemorative murals to the intimate preservation of life in portraiture. Inevitably, this function is never neutral. It is shot through with ideology, affect, and the problem of representation. The section opens with Paolo Palladino’s ‘Picturing the Messianic: Agamben and Titian’s The Nymph and the Shepherd’, which revisits Renaissance painting through a critical, non-antiquarian lens. Palladino reads Titian’s The Nymph and the Shepherd (c.1570) not as pastoral myth, but as a meditation on messianic temporality – a reading based on Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of the painting as visualizing a state of radical inoperativity, where the dialectic of nature and culture is suspended, and freedom appears in the guise of otium (a kind of purposeless peace). Yet, Palladino departs from Agamben’s utopian reading, suggesting instead that the painting’s melancholic tone, erotic ambiguity, and unresolved temporalities might signal something closer to death than emancipation. The shepherd and nymph, frozen in a moment after seduction, are not united in bliss but alienated in their post-coital distance, a ‘standstill’ that conflates erotic fulfilment with symbolic death. By reframing Titian’s work as a commentary on the body, gender, and finitude, Palladino invites us to view even the most canonical painting as a site where biopolitical and existential questions play out. The result is a re-reading of the painterly that connects Renaissance form with contemporary concerns about life, death, and the limits of representation.
Painting is also where societies and individuals confront trauma, frequently through abstraction, allegory, or what Hal Foster calls the ‘reconceiving of appearance as traumatic . . . of experience as its own loss, without punctual presence or coherent narrative’ (Foster in Kwon, 1996: 63). The articles in this section explore how the painterly engages with what is absent or unspeakable: lost lives, silenced histories, psychic wounds. How can an image summon that which resists representation? How do memorial sites deploy visual strategies to negotiate collective memory? And conversely, how are visual forms reshaped by the imprint of trauma, whether on the site of the individual (as will be seen with de Kooning’s late works) or society at large (in relation, for example, to the responses to 9/11)? In these cases that follow, painting is both archive and process, preserving memory, transforming it, and sometimes generating memory where none previously existed. Theoretical backdrops include Freud’s (2003 [1920]) trauma theory, Hirsch’s (2012) ‘postmemory’, Lyotard’s (1984) sublime (the unpresentable), and Foster’s (1996) ‘return of the real’. Furthermore, it is necessarily a transnational story: trauma and its image-economies are bound up with war, genocide, colonialism, and systemic violence.
A key theoretical contribution that brings this section (and the issue as a whole) to a close is Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘Anamnesis: Of the Visible’, which addresses directly the problem of memory and the limits of representation. For Lyotard, painting is not merely a visual act but a labour of Durcharbeitung – a working through akin to psychoanalysis. Painting, like anamnesis, strives to make something visible that exceeds the visible. The image, for Lyotard, is not a record of what has happened, but a gesture toward what remains ungraspable: the immemorial, the unpresentable, the Thing. He distinguishes anamnesis from historical memory or narrative history: it is not about retrieving a past event in empirical detail, but about preparing the space for that which was never fully present in the first place to surface. This is the ‘presence’ of absence, a trace that cannot be confirmed but that still insists. In his words, painting is ‘a passion for colour’ where colour erupts ‘from the depth of night’, bearing the mark of what it has survived (cf. Barthes, ‘Colouring, Degree Zero’, in the previous section, ‘Word, Image, Mediation’). In Lyotard’s terms, trauma art becomes not an illustration of suffering but a site of ethical labour. The painter, like the analysand, opens themself to what has not yet come (cf. Cixous, 2012). Lyotard cautions against representational realism and directs us instead to the threshold – the liminal site where appearance and disappearance fold into each other. The image is spasm, apparition, and trace; it is a form of testimony that remains fundamentally inadequate, and therefore ethical. As with Ettinger’s matrixial aesthetics, the image remembers not through clarity but through colour, rhythm, and fragment. Lyotard’s call to make visible that which cannot be seen is a provocation to understand the painterly as a site of existential and moral struggle, not mastery. Lyotard’s account resonates through the various readings in this section, where memory is not an archive but a force – affective, bodily, and relational (so also connecting back to the prior section, ‘Affect, Body, Gesture’).
Patrizia Violi’s ‘Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum’ takes us to three specific sites of dark memory: Tuol Sleng in Cambodia (a school turned torture centre under the Khmer Rouge, now a genocide museum), Villa Grimaldi in Chile (a notorious detention centre under Pinochet, now a memorial and museum), and the Ustica Museum in Bologna (commemorating an Italian plane bombing in 1980). While these are not about painting in the traditional art historical sense, they are about images and representation: each site grapples with how to display evidence of trauma (photographs of victims, remnants, artistic installations) to the public. Violi is concerned with the politics of display. For instance, Tuol Sleng exhibits haunting mug shots of prisoners taken by the regime; these photographs (documents that are also unintended portraits) have become icons of Cambodian collective memory and unspeakable terror. The Ustica Museum uniquely uses an installation by artist Christian Boltanski involving lights and mirrors to evoke the presence of the dead – a painterly, if conceptual, gesture turning debris into a luminescent memorial. Violi’s comparative analysis highlights different strategies, some explicit and graphic, others abstract and minimalist. Underlying is the perennial question: can aesthetic representation do justice to trauma, or does it risk aestheticizing horror? The politics of memory here refers to how nations remember violence – what is shown, what is omitted, how narratives are shaped. Violi argues that these museums actively shape collective memory. This ties to questions of mediation (in the previous section), whereby the arrangement of images and artifacts (much like curating an art exhibit) is a powerful act of storytelling. The painterly is found in how these spaces create an atmosphere, a sensory experience that goes beyond factual reportage – much as a history painting once tried to make viewers feel the battle or Titian’s The Nymph and the Shepherd presents time. These sites make us feel the weight of the past. Furthermore, Violi reminds us that the memory of trauma often crystallizes around images: the face of a victim, the photograph of a ruined building, an art piece that becomes emblematic (like Picasso’s Guernica, absent from her list but an archetype of trauma painting).
Karen J. Engle’s ‘Putting Mourning to Work: Making Sense of 9/11’ addresses a more recent trauma – the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 – and how art and culture responded. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was a surge of memorials and images (the Twin Towers collapsing became an infamous global image), along with art projects aimed at coping or commenting on the tragedy. Engle’s title suggests an active process: mourning put to work implies using grief as a resource to produce meaning or action. She examines public art memorials (including the Tribute in Light, two beams projected in NYC), the flood of amateur images and missing-persons posters that became part of the urban fabric, or later artworks and films that tried to ‘make sense’ of 9/11. Engle draws on psychoanalytic theory, specifically Freud (2005 [1917]) on mourning and melancholia, to consider to what extent the US engaged in productive mourning or became stuck in melancholia and trauma. An interesting visual aspect is how abstract art or conceptual gestures took on memorial tasks – for example, Gerhard Richter’s painting September (a blur of the towers) offers a painterly processing, blurring the documentary into the reflective. Engle discusses how narratives of 9/11 were constructed (heroism, innocence, evil, etc.) while some art resisted simple narrativization, keeping the wound open to reflection rather than closure. The work of mourning leads Engle to advocate for an ethical work of memory – not consuming or freezing images of tragedy as fetish, but using them to foster critical awareness or solidarity. This is the fraught tightrope trauma-related art walks: between memorialiaztion and mythologization, between evoking empathy and exploiting emotion.
As Lütticken (2014) observes, the autonomy of art – far from being an escape from politics or memory – can itself become an aesthetic performance that intervenes in public discourses of loss and representation. Another contribution in this register is Jacob Copeman and Alice Street’s ‘The Image after Strathern: Art and Persuasive Relationality in India’s Sanguinary Politics’. While not about trauma in the conventional museological or psychoanalytic sense, their account of blood-based portraiture in Indian political protest offers a potent reflection on affective image-making and embodied memory. Drawing on Marilyn Strathern’s ethnographic theory of the image as relational rather than representational, Copeman and Street analyse portraits of political martyrs painted in real blood. These images do not merely depict; they enact (returning us to the earlier section, ‘Affect, Body, Gesture’). The body of the artist – through its literal material contribution – becomes a site of memory, sacrifice, and political alliance. Memory is not just signified but made material, not simply commemorated but re-performed. The resulting works bypass traditional iconography and instead operate through affective force and visceral proximity. In doing so, they extend the notion of painterly trauma into the terrain of activist ritual: the image becomes not only a site of witness but of commitment. Their contribution therefore resonates with prior discussions of mourning and testimony, yet does so by foregrounding relationality and embodiment as critical to any ethical politics of representation. Where Violi analysed museum curation and Engle conceptual abstraction, Copeman and Street insist on the immediacy and corporeality of image politics.
To conclude this section, we can turn to a striking ‘private’ study of memory, meaning and mark-making, with Mariam Fraser’s ‘“The Face-Off Between Will and Fate”: Artistic Identity and Neurological Style in de Kooning’s Late Works’. Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning developed dementia in his late years yet continued to paint through its onset. Fraser’s article examines how de Kooning’s late paintings – with their sweeping yet oddly economical strokes – became the subject of debate: were these works testaments to pure, unfettered artistic will, or products of neurological deterioration altering (faltering) his style? Fraser navigates between biographical, neurological, and aesthetic analysis to show how the body (in this case, the aging, ailing brain and hand of the artist) leaves its signature on the artwork. The painterly gesture here is literally cerebral – both in origin and in how critics interpreted it (some saw a loss of cognitive control, others a distilled essence of de Kooning’s art). Fraser’s nuanced account refuses a simple binary and instead highlights the entanglement of will and body: de Kooning’s muscle memory, years of embodied practice, allowed him to continue creating, but the shifts in his brain’s function also introduced new formal qualities. This case study powerfully illustrates the concept of the body in the image. The paintings themselves can be viewed as neuro-aesthetic documents, registering on canvas the silent drama within the artist’s brain. In a broader sense, Fraser prompts us to consider every painting as traces of bodily being – each brushstroke an index of an arm’s movement, a pulse of affect, a neural impulse turned into line and colour.
From Violi’s forensic spaces to Copeman and Street’s sanguinary politics, from Engle’s cultural mourning to Ettinger’s intergenerational witnessing and Fraser’s account of the trace, we see a spectrum of artistic strategies that refuse the closure of narrative or the comfort of aesthetic resolution. These works do not represent trauma; they enact its ongoing implications. They remind us that images not only show but do – that they summon, unsettle, and implicate. This view persists, if not extends with contemporary art. Bohn (2022), for example, writes on how art’s evental character – its capacity to enact rather than merely depict – offers social theory a dynamic model of contingency, locality, and interruption. Of course, these were ideas that were beginning to emerge at the time Lyotard was writing. In thinking back to his essay in this collection, I seek to hold onto his meditation on the ethical stakes of painting in an age of systems and spectacle. In a world where images are rapidly commodified, the work of art risks being reduced to cultural noise. Yet the painterly, he insists, is something else: a spasm, a break, a testimony that owes nothing and asks everything. The painter is not the one who sees best but the one who, ‘no longer knowing what to make of it all’, dares to paint nonetheless.
Concluding Remarks
Across the four thematic sections (Painting and the Political; Affect, Body, Gesture; Word, Image, Mediation; and Memory, Trauma, Image), this e-special has sustained the view that painting is not to be regarded simply as a self-contained genre or medium. Rather, the painterly marks a shifting field: a locus of theoretical concern and critical possibility that traverses disciplinary boundaries and material forms. We have seen that painterly practices are not confined to canvas or pigment. They encompass street murals, digital image assemblages, curatorial design, bodily inscription, and conceptual gestures. The painterly appears wherever images are worked, felt, encountered, where the question of visibility, traces, mark-making is entangled with the question of how we live together. Hence, the painterly image – whether blurred like Richter’s, blood-born like Yadav’s, or minimal like Rothko’s – is never simply a container of memory. It is a mode of remembering that operates at the borders of seeing and knowing, where sensation, affect, and ethical force converge. In this register, the painterly becomes a sustained labour: to hold open a space in which the unremembered might emerge, and where the imperative is not to render trauma legible and nor indeed ‘eloquent’, but to remain in contestation. Again, to echo Lyotard, painting is never mere representation but anamnesis: the visual labour of what cannot be entirely known yet must not be forgotten.
The expanded field of painting reflects Rosalind Krauss’s account of the ‘post-medium condition’, in which medium-specific categories are displaced by cross-modal, conceptual, and affective formations. What persists, what painting contributes across these iterations, is a sensibility: a mode of attention to surface, to touch, to temporality, and to the lived body. A guiding thread throughout has been the reciprocal relation between painting and theory. Several contributions show not only how theory illuminates painting, but how painting itself thinks – how it stages problems, disturbs assumptions, and performs critical work. Foucault’s epistemic account of visibility finds form in Bosch; Ettinger’s matrixial aesthetics paint a theory of trauma and co-affectivity; Daoist thought rewires Deleuze’s ‘refrain’. These crossings suggest that painting and theory are not separate domains but co-constitutive practices, each probing the limits of what can be known, said, or shown.
Certain motifs recur across the issue, creating constellations that span the sections. Indeterminacy, for example, surfaces in Peng Yu’s discussion of Xu, in Ettinger’s trans-subjective brushwork, and in the suspended temporality of trauma images. Likewise, visibility and its occlusion, whether in Nubani’s camouflage, in Lyotard’s figural, or in the unseen of state violence, reveal a shared concern with how power circulates through the image. These resonances underscore the extent to which painting, in its expanded sense, becomes a testing ground for negotiating the limits of representation, subjectivity, and the political imaginary. What remains is a view of the painterly not as a residual or nostalgic concern, but as a site of ongoing theoretical activity. In an age saturated with digital imagery and accelerated visuality, painting (a mode of working, of slowing, of encountering) offers a counterpoint. It reminds us of the weight of the hand, the grain of the surface, the friction of perception. It insists on the body, even when that body is fractured, displaced, or dispersed across media. In sum, Painting / Knowledge affirms that painting remains not only an enduring practice within visual culture, but a companion to/with/of theory – one that complicates, deepens, and sometimes exceeds its discursive reach. If the articles gathered here achieve anything collectively, it is to demonstrate that painting remains irrefutable, not because it is fixed or definable (not as a form of ‘truth’), but because it continues to move (and move us): across time, across forms, and across the precarious terrain of what it means to see, to feel, and to know.
