BEFORE PAINTING.

500 HOURS OF LABOUR JELLYFICATION PROCESS.

2017-2020.

Transferred millimeter paper on canvas, Process of 500 hours (3 exemplars). 120cm x 80cm.

Photo Credits photo: Marcelina Wellmer.

insta: @marcelinawellmer

Description: How not to prepare a canvas.

I got an unfinished big robust canvas oil painting (300 cm x 250 cm “musician with a dancer”) from kleinenanzaigen. The painter was unknown by the seller. I cut the canvas for a painting 120 cm x 80 cm, and I re-prepared the canvas with traditional technique for oil painting, primed with white Gesso. My concern was to have a really flat surface in order to make some experiment with iron dust on it and to start a ephemeral painting. I tried different solutions to record the different movement of the iron dust in the vibrating surface of the canvas. The most effective one was to transfered the print of millimeter paper into the canvas, but I never succeed to have a complete flat surface.

This because the transfer of the millimeter paper print is always really sensitive to mistakes, accidents, imperfections, and the surface of the canvas is never perfectly flat: the materiality of the canvas won the battle. I continued trying, sandpapering the surface over and over, replacing the blank spot, repairing, touching, repeating the process thousand of times.

The work started to be about something else, it got hijacked or bifurcated, it was now about jellyfy my artistic labour with a process of destruction/ cancellation of a previous painting, creation of chaos before be able to work on it again. The painting is the registration of this process of failure and of an impossible task repeated for 500 hours( I had to decide when to stop). So, „before painting“.