Resumen de Images (Not) Made By Chance
To the artist in need of inspiration, Leonardo recommends: “look at walls splashed with a number of stains or stones of various mixed colours”; the artist who can, in fact, pull new ideas from such inchoate forms proves himself worthy of the name. The motif of change images –as it appears in the work of Leonardo and many others down to the present –generally takes image-making to be a productive, positive, and additive affair. In the wake of Reformation image breaking, however, specifically in certain modes of Dutch landscape painting, where the destructive, negative, and subtractive operations integral to image-making come to the fore, this motif takes an ironic turn. In the context, the erasure and alteration of earlier images emerges as integral to the artistic process- now understood less as the birth of the new than as the (sometimes violent) engagement with what was always, already there.
