Charles Bernstein Interviews Bruce Pearson at BOMB

"Now is a little on the early side, don’t you think?" Bernstein's introduction to their conversation begins. "We never arrive there, then again, we’re never anywhere else." Picking up: 

I like to think of history as a set of frames that let us see one part of what’s before our eyes at the cost of framing out something else. That’s why seeing is always temporal, always mediated by words.

We see not just through words but with words. There’s no way around it.

Yet the idea is precarious.

Put it this way: Abstraction is never more than an extension of figuration just as figuration is never more than an extension of abstraction.

In Bruce Pearson’s paintings, you see the figures melting into the paint then look again and all you see is abstract patterns. Since the work is filled with letters, which in small groups make up words, and which, in turn, constitute phrases, so much depends on how you frame it. Indeed, the frames—verbal, visual, textual, textural—come fast upon one another, piling up like the layers of a palimpsest.

The idea that you see a painting all at once, or that colors or shapes are any less symbolic than words or figures, is a malady of critical discourse that is given its comeuppance in each of Pearson’s works.

Pearson’s paintings offer balm for sore eyes. They are an aesthetic oculus lucidus. But unlike the medieval powder, which was made of dried, pulverized honeysuckle, they are made of oil and acrylic on polystyrene foam.

You have to read Pearson’s paintings, but that just intensifies the visuality.

Continue at BOMB.