Video of paintings

Video of the paintings in the 'Three Painters' exhibition at Howard Gardens Gallery, Cardiff, UK, 17th November to 11th December 2007.

3-in-1

Triptych (Eke, Crusifixus, The Spirit of Modernism), 2005-7. Oil on canvas.

The paintings should be landscape, still-life and figure composition at the same time.

Artist's statement

Aphoria, 2005, Oil on canvas.

Extract from my artist's statement for the "Three Painters" exhibition at Howard Gardens gallery, CSAD, Cardiff, November 17th to December 11th 2007.

...Pepperell’s paintings form part of a wider philosophical challenge to a western metaphysics that has dominated our thinking on key philosophical problems but which he argues is now subject to fundamental revision because of new ideas emerging in the sciences and humanities. For example, we have to abandon the notion that anything has a beginning, or end; we have to recognise there are no objects in the world; we must discard the division between the mind and world (while simultaneously acknowledging it); we must accept that it is in the mind where all qualities and properties exist while also recognising that the mind is in the world.

By adopting some of the primary visual languages of western metaphysics (baroque, romantic and rococo painting) to generate images that are both visceral and spiritual, and in which objects are both present and absent, he asks the viewer to perceive the world as essentially contradictory and indeterminate. This is in opposition to the dominant western tradition, sustained by the ethos of empiricist science, which holds that reality is rational and deterministic.

Despite his scepticism about the scientific ethos, Pepperell’s work has recently been the subject of a number of scientific investigations by laboratories in vision and brain research at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany. Samples of Pepperell’s paintings were tested against a sample of art historical works, and audience responses to certain perceptual tasks were measured. A number of significant findings emerged, which have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Comparison in fragmented perception

The qualities we are aware of in the perceptual field - in objects we experience - arise from our simultaneous cognizance of conflicting attributes (e.g. smallness/largeness, redness/blueness, forward/back, loudness/quietness). We are aware (to some extent semi-consciously/sub-consciously) of the multiple perceptual attributes as distinct cognitive moments, as separate strands of perception that do not get merged into a singularity, but bump and clash with each other to generate the vibrant diversity of our conscious experience.

Self-awareness is paradoxical

Paradoxes and contradictions of self-reference should not be seen as logical dead-ends, or failures of argument. On the contrary, they constitute the very essence of self-aware mind, and the point beyond which we cannot go.

Thought as contradiction

We cannot have thought without contradiction, just as we cannot impose a boundary without creating a paradox.

Representations

Magritte, The Treason of Images, 1928

Once matter is arranged so as to evoke something other than itself, when it is turned into a representation, it turns into what it represents. A picture of a pipe is clearly a pipe, although seen as pipe and picture at the same time.

I don't have conscious experiences

• My consciousness consists in and extends to that which I am conscious of. If I am conscious of a door then that door forms part of the totality of my conscious experience; it is to some extent ‘consciousness’.

• When I look at an object it is not just that I become conscious of it — it becomes my consciousness.

• I cannot have an experience, since that implies there is some agent separate from the experience having the having. I can only be an experience.

The fragments of mind

Apollo at the gardens of Versailles

• In our minds, we arbitrarily divide the world into fragments and then feel we have discovered something when we find they can be connected.

• Helmholtz (1878) argued all physical qualities — colour, texture, smell, shape, etc. — belong not to objects in the world but to our perceptual faculties. It is we who mistakenly assign such qualities to the objects ‘in themselves’. This applies even to the quality of ‘objecthood’.

• In one sense, objects do not have any existence independent of perception. In another sense, objects (insofar as the word has any sense) clearly do exist, since we encounter them on a daily basis.

Deep reality

Deep Reality, 2007, Oil on canvas on board

Deep reality might be described as a conception of reality that acknowledges the absence of individual or bounded entities. Instead, reality is understood as an essentially unbroken continuum, albeit one that appears as uneven, fluctuating and variegated.

Objects, as they appear to us, are better understood as indefinitely extending relationships of perceptual attributes, clumps of seemingly localised properties with infinitely distributed parts, most of which we are habitually oblivious to.

Seeing the world 'as it is'

Blooming, buzzing confusion, 2007, Oil on panel

It may be that young infants, and those who have sight restored after having been born blind, 'see' the world in a way that is more faithful to its true state of being than those who see it as being full of objects.

To the those without the capacity to see objects (as far as we know this is the case in very young children and post-operative cataract patients, or those diagnosed with visual agnosia) the world must seem, as William James termed it, like a "blooming, buzzing, confusion", i.e. rich, variegated, mobile, but ultimately devoid of recognisable 'things'.

But of course, this is much closer to what the world is really like. It does not contain discrete, separate things, even though we might strongly believe it does. In fact it contains nothing our senses would lead us believe is there: no colours, sounds, textures, shapes, smells, hot or cold values, etc. All these appear only as a consequence of our sensory apprehension of the world.

Because we know this (it is uncontroversial scientific knowledge, as has been so for more than a century) we have to accept the consequences for our understanding of reality.