Liquid Perspective

story © Michael Betancourt | published July 30, 1997 | permalink |  |  

I make pictures where the space of the picture is really flat, but you think it isn’t at first. It looks like it has some depth -- maybe not much, but some -- but then you see something else that forces you to change how you thought about the space, and then you realize it wasn’t at all the way it looked at first. You can’t do that with real pictures, ones made that try to be like reality. The Japanese try to build rock gardens that make you rethink arrangements with your memory, but it just isn’t the same as a picture. Their idea of “ma” I like. It’s about the way our memory of what we’ve seen shapes our understanding of what we’re seeing now. That’s what they try to show with their rock gardens.

My pictures don’t use their idea of “ma” but it’s related to what I do. I don’t know a word that describes what I do very well. “Liquid Perspective” was suggested by a friend of mine, and I like that idea too. The perspective just flows around the picture and you get carried with it.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published September 23, 1996 | permalink |  |  

My paper constructions are not simple formalism using the human body as a source; they are the idea of transformation given a concrete form. As each composite of elemnets is considered an array of potential images emerge. This reflects back to us how we see the world centered around ourselves, and it is this vision which we use to construct a reality around us: we see ourselves in our world because we invent that world as much by looking as physically with our hands. Ours is a human world because we are human. The simultaneous appearance of depth against a ‘flat reality’ is simply an expression of our perceptions. Without us, our world is flat.

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