The diversity of the languages of art seems to have displaced the prominence of painting as the noblest of the arts. It has displaced its preeminence over the rest of the expressions, of the complex theoretical frameworks that have been formulated about it, and that now have become references in memory of the treatises of art.

Julian Schnabel:  

Portrait of Tatiana Lisovskaia As The Duquesa De Alba II, 2014 

Oil, gesso, resin on canvas 

132” x 96”  (335.3 x 243.8 cm) 

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/julian-schnabel-hon-ra 

Painting has survived the onslaught of current art marked by fluidity, hybridization or plurality, typical of a society of the image and where the unique act of painting, in solitude, is being invited to other types of reflections that go beyond the exploration of its format, its medium, its specific materiality, or the definitions based on the “neos” as neo-expressionism or the “trans” as trans-avant-garde.

Gerhard Richter , September, 2005

Oil on canvas  20,47” x 28,35”  (52 cm x 72 cm)  

https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/art/paintings/photo-paintings/death-9/september-13954

Continually challenged and questioned, painting has accepted to be one more mode of expression within the wealth of contemporary expressions. It has abandoned its reign and in doing so has achieved the freedom of not being the only one to become -as Achile Bonito Oliva wrote- a “sweet subject”, not a dominant one in the history of art.

Jena Thomas : Boyhood, 2019  

Oil on canvas  

34” x 36”  (86,36 x 92,44 cm) 

The action of painting, of recognizing painting in its survival, is capable of claiming for itself the differences, the eclecticism, the citation, the appropriation, the recycling and others, with the intention of understanding the different forces of meaning it encounters, the diverse vectors of knowledge and research with which to center the pictorial in its field of valuation and its development today.