Q: Do you succeed always?

A: Yes, I succeed thirty percent of the time.

Q: Then you don´t succeed always.

A: Yes I do. To succeed 30% of the time is always.

- Susan Sontag

When I look at paintings they can affect me strongly, and they do so in part through creating uncertainty. This is perhaps a paradox, and it is beyond something representational. By this I mean to say that it is almost impossible for me to clearly explain what a painting is to me. My personal engagement with them involves a continuous adjustment as I scan them for suggestions of my response to them. The medium, with its own rhythms and textures, seems both distinct from the represented subject matter and yet at the same time to embody it. What is at stake is not how depictions are made to convey the look of their subject, but rather how recognition – the most basic relation we have to the world – functions in a distinctive way within painting. When painting is at it’s best, it shows the viewer time. And with this in mind, the artists that are most interesting to me, do not set out to show the look of the world as something previously known, but rather try to extend the thread of recognition into new and complex structures. In looking at paintings, I think the task is not to understand them, or to read meaning into them, but to accept them as experience, to be with them and to begin from there.

-Tyra Tingleff