RESEARCH PROJECT / IR-P01
Already Painted?
ARTISTIC RESEARCH INTO THE POSSIBILITIES OF VISUAL LANGUAGE IN CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
- Categories
- Painting Research / Visual Language
- Years
- 2026–present
- Status
- Active
- Organizer
- IMAGE RESEARCH
02 · THE CENTRAL QUESTION
Can a fundamentally new visual language still emerge?
No. Everything has already been painted.
DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY “NEW”.
Maybe. But not if you go looking for it.
ONLY RECOMBINATIONS, EVER SINCE THE 1960S.
In oil on canvas? In 2026?
The algorithms have already seen everything.
Yes.
“From today, painting is dead.”
ATTRIBUTED TO PAUL DELAROCHE, 1839
Yes, only it won’t be painting any more.
ASK AGAIN IN FIFTY YEARS.
A language nobody else takes up stays a style.
WRONG QUESTION.
About
03 · WHAT WE ARE RESEARCHING
This is the central question of IR-P01, the first artistic research project initiated by IMAGE RESEARCH. We do not assume that painting has exhausted its possibilities, nor that a new language can be produced to order. We want to understand what separates a formal variation from a structural transformation, and under what conditions the latter can become a coherent visual system.
Novelty does not necessarily mean inventing unknown elements. A line, a colour or a particular way of representing may have a long history, while the relations between them produce a different organisation of the image. This is the possibility we are researching: the emergence of a visual syntax that goes beyond a single effect and allows different images to be built from the same logic.
Goal
01 · THE FIRST QUESTION
How much can a painting change without its language really changing?
This experience gave rise to the project’s first question. How much can a painting change without its language really changing? Influence is inevitable, and the history of art is built through continuity and reinterpretation as well. Still, there is a difference between developing a personal expression inside a known language and altering the principles by which an image is constructed.
Throughout history, transformations of this kind have opened up new ways of representing and expressing. Some outgrew the practice of the artists who developed them and became visual languages that later generations could use and transform. Today almost all of these possibilities coexist, and a painter can move between extremely different traditions, styles and procedures. That very freedom raises a problem: how much of what we perceive as new is a real change, and how much is another use of existing solutions?
Background
POINT OF DEPARTURE
“Towards the end of 2024 I began changing everything I could in my figurative painting: the brushwork, the palette, the texture, the way one form meets another. The paintings changed. But every time I stepped back, I recognised someone.
Modigliani. Munch. Rembrandt. Sargent. Ingres. Botticelli. Tonitza. Grigorescu.
I wasn’t copying them. They had simply got there before me.”
Investigations
04 · THE RESEARCH
The studio as
laboratory
The practical work takes place mainly in the studio of the project’s principal researcher.
Painting is the main instrument of investigation. Experiments may start from a problem formulated in advance or from a spontaneous observation, and the documentation follows their development without imposing a predetermined artistic result.
05 · THE TOOL
The working
taxonomy
To analyse what happens during the process, the project uses a working taxonomy of painting organised into about twenty-four categories. It allows elements such as form, colour, contour, space, surface, materiality or compositional structure to be examined, and above all the relations between them.
Categories touched by the example on page 05. Each category branches further into subcategories, from 1.1.1 vertical to 24.2.3 synthesis.
- 01Format / support
- 02Composition
- 03Line
- 04Contour
- 05Colour
- 06Tonal value
- 07Form / volume
- 08Space
- 09Brushwork / technique
- 10Texture
- 11Rhythm / repetition
- 12Internal scale
- 13Figure / motif
- 14Materiality
- 15Time / process
- 16Function
- 17System
- 18Relation to the viewer
- 19Overall coherence
- 20Surface
- 21Painterliness
- 22Image – object
- 23Register
- 24Relation to tradition
06 · THE TRANSFER TEST
One logic, five subjects
It is not enough for two paintings to look different. We try to identify what exactly has changed in their construction and whether the change can generate other possibilities. A direction that works in a portrait, for example, can be tested on other subjects, in other formats or in abstract compositions. If it keeps its logic and goes on producing different results, we have an indication of its generative capacity.
The structure stays. The subject changes.
Portrait. A head and shoulders form the dominant left-side mass. The inclined plane, off-centre focus and smaller framed field on the right retain the same spatial arrangement.
- CONSTANT
- Diagonal division, displaced compositional centre, dominant left-side mass.
- VARIABLE
- Subject, represented forms, internal organisation.
Illustrative model only. This demonstration does not establish that a pictorial language has been experimentally validated.
07 · THE PRECEDENT
Experiments are accompanied by observations, photographic documentation and comparative analysis. Studying historical and contemporary precedents makes it possible to assess similarities, and also differences that are not always evident at first sight. Finding a similar solution in the history of art does not automatically close a direction. What matters is whether the similarity concerns only the appearance of the image or its very structure.
In this process some hypotheses may be abandoned and others reconsidered after a while. An experiment may not lead to an autonomous artwork and still clarify a problem, reveal a precedent or provide a useful tool for later research.
PROVISIONAL CONCLUSION
The project does not set out to claim originality before it can examine it critically. We are trying to understand how much of the territory of contemporary painting continues languages already known, and where there might be room for a deeper change.
- ORGANISATION
- IMAGE RESEARCH
- PROJECT
- IR-P01 / Project 01
2026–2027