Orange You Glad You Can Read: An approach towards painting by Frances Scholz

by Noura Wedell

We have such a poor idea of thinking, and of what leads thinking. Orange you glad you can read is pretty much a history of the enlightenment, its mistaken conception of reason caught within false dualities: idealism versus materialism, or should we say words versus images, or was that representation and the real, or the self and the other? Well honey, you can get off the merry-go-round now. It's dangerous, and it's been a few centuries now that the thing has been churning on empty. And anyway, there have always been people looking at that strange contraption from the sidelines gesturing frantically for you to get off, or just laughing and doing their thing, or making a slow choreography with their hands in the air... Orange you glad you can read means you skid along on the surface of signs. It's a way in. Call it poetry if you like. Call it metaphysical investigation. Call it a method.

The color orange pertains to the visual, aesthetics, and materiality. It's the spectral opposite of blue, light against shadows. But isn't it also the penal colony, you know, that thing that's on the TV show? Orange, incidentally, is also the color of that strange new clown's hair we see everywhere, the incumbent president of the largest penal colony on earth. Reading, well, that is what education used to be for. It was a way to navigate the law of signs, abstraction, idealism, the common conventions of meaning, some way to be responsible to truth.

But the merry-go-round was a war zone, making claims for representation (painting as representation of the real), for truth, and for power.

Now that signs no longer refer to their referent things are different. What was it, let's try to remember, simulacrum and seduction, the spectacle, the neoliberal revolution? Right to work? And what about in our own backyard, our extreme claims to radicality ...

Orange you glad you can read shows us that in the destruction of meaning the accident is constructive. We've trashed the map called the mind-body problem. Now we're on our own, skidding along the continuum. The mistake lets us glide all the way to the top, back to the beginning, down to the spark. It's a rudderless method of intuition, improvisation, subtracting or adding material and heeding connections. Skidding along on the aren't orange suctions us back like a vacuum. It's a way of getting to the void. And as you know, the void is everywhere, the origin everywhere and all the time.

In this case it's a horse in a field down the road. No, it's not next door. You need to make some kind of effort to see it; you drive there. The horse is unkempt, its mane wild and straggly. It's a non-composite, immaterial, soul-like entity called a monad, pregnant with the future and laden with the past, self-sufficient, including all of its relations to every other monad in the universe. It appears slowly on the wall through a process of projection, and layering, and tentative probing, so tremblingly that you don't recognize it for what you though it was. Now it's a mass of cowboys huddled around an animal they love that they've roped down in a pen, their hats catching the light of the history of European painting.