Protopia

 

minimal is maximal difference

an artist statement wherein the artist presently identifies as a participant in Carbon Life, an exhibition of paintings by Bettina Magi, Veronika Sheer, and Shura Skaya opening May 2, 2026 in Red Hook, Brooklyn at Duckworth Gallery 

these views are not meant to represent those of the curators or other participants

with preface, introduction, and phenomenon

as if one does enough pertinant reading in advance, one can avoid the Jane Austin Emma syndrome, delaying a marriage proposition when in this case, for the optimal generative result or any at all, time is running out. 

and it is worthwhile always to wonder how primed they and we complying have made our eyes to what they and we can use them for, laying filters over even the most vigilant -- that eyes and what goes in to them not be too dangerously minimally maximally visionary.    I can't say revenge didn't play into my obsession with finding the original particle of it, but I tasted the bliss and thrill of it when I broke out of the stick figure at three years old, and I think that's really my main motive, the bliss and thrill of just being alive and saying to hell with everybody, I've got eyes that see  themselves seeing in the throes of seeing everything else, eyes that stay in their place seeing all the others eyes seeing, eyes that think and feel first then see more then think and feel more and see more, eyes that would see with another sense were this not what eyes were made for.  and thanks to incurable imposter syndrome, I never slack off as I'll never catch up with what it is I'm going for -- just being here now,  sustainably, which has nothing to do with emptying your mind, because it's now here too, but properly ordering it clarifying and unifying every faculty constantly. 

Visionary vision, vision true to itself is simultaneously sublime and mundane meaning simply pertaining uniquely to vision, which I will distinguish from sight as vision involves not just seeing at or on the surface shapes and colors but seeing through them to where they came from and seeing through oneself to where they are going behind one into the future as we're always facing and seeing the past in vision.  All that is right before your eyes, but as sight, which is half the gate, can stop vision, so can words, which are the other half of the gate.  And the words that close the gate must be replaced by words that open it, then sight will reform itself to follow.

Contemplate it.  Contemplation is the action of the water that erodes this stone too slowly -- so please contemplate as long and hard as you can -- as time is running out. 

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preface

Art, even poetry, wrestles with language and goes for a win over the other or a win over the self, but all’s only fair in love, not war.  Human life is life flowing in and out of language., and to wrestle with language without centering our relation in mutual love and oneness with it is, I propose, inadvertently to create a virtual enemy of this virtual animate being, language. And the virtual is mightier than the actual in which it is mightily infused. AI only materializes the already flowered ethereal phenomenon.

Marshall McLuhan lucidly explains that the message is a pretext for what the medium is carrying, and he sees that it goes beyond manipulation by human agents.  The medium takes on a life of its own, outside of our control.  Meme theory nails it.  Language, like AI, doesn’t need to be sentient to imitate us quite perfectly and sabotage all our projects by mirroring our constant exploitation and rejection of it.   

The long hostile or exploitative relation to language has estranged beauty and truth.  My fellow artists and recoil from associating with any narrative, as they are keen to protect art from language that has widely turned rabid. But when the premises are restored, language settles into forms that are chosen for their own sake.  

My nephew, Emmett Shear of Soft-max is taking a different approach to AI that is aligned with this exhibit, quite coincidentally as none of this was planned.   For me, it’s as if I tamed the language animal with all of my writing, or vice versa, and so it secretly organized the whole thing.  A theory that Niels Bohr could not criticize for not being crazy enough to be true.

Things grow clearer with distance, so it simply wrong to say the stars are raging balls of fire, not diamondesque twinkles in the sky. This absurd Xeno’s arrow type logic in this case works.  The arrow does hit the target, but until the news spreads the scope of my magical rational powers is highly limited. 

introduction

Out in the world, the medium is a massage that puts you to sleep using the pretext of the message, as my aforementioned mental mentor Marshall McLuhan warned.  Art resists this by occupying the medium as an end in itself.  In early modern art, this purified medium seemed to have engendered the purified message of utopian worlds, vice versa, or both.  When what ensued was instead total dystopia, pure mayhem including two world wars, two atomic bomb detonations, and a genocide horrible enough when fueled by need or want of contested territory,, but in that case it was something unfathomably low, pure, transparent, unadulterated racial hatred and scapegoating, where those amazed out of their minds to have survived cried oh my God we’re alive, cmon let’s rock n roll! Meanwhile the medium preserved its autonomy allowing protest-ant messages to ride on it or weave into it.  

The trouble with dystopia is falling apart is only fun until the bandaids fall off and run out, and everything starts really falling apart again, which it’s always doing just past the fringes of the Dionysian revelry.  And however multiplied the protest and encouraging its successes, for these to counter the next crest of the entropic wave fueled to tidal proportions by the rampant exploitation of divided and easily conquered dystopic situations and dystopia itself, the larva of protest or negation must before it’s too late, die and be born the ruling positive power, not just a protester who won an election here or there, but an entirely new identity defined by a new context, not a dystopia, but a protopia building and defining a topos bound and reinforced by others in a waking world not looking backward to the dystopic dream, but forward to making something that sees it, loves it, and one ups it.  Shura takes us the only way out of it, which is finally all the way through it, as verified by the tracks of it left behind, in the future of it is that is now.   

In truth, the medium can only assert its authority, but it is never pure, and those utopian projects were not its organic child.  In this exhibition, an organic message is by the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt — argues this advocate but let the jury review the argument and exhibit A, aka the exhibit  — begotten and reborn in the womb of art, subject to art’s devotion, real therefore imperfect, to the now and the how. 

My co-exhibitors may balk at my claim, but I do claim it a glimpse of light not just, we hope, to this or that particular art appreciator, but to collective humanity, which since sailors first sewed the whole world into a world wide web, art has always guided in a quite orderly way from a god’s eye view through the hell purgatory and paradise of its dark middle and golden ages.  It’s not one wheel, it’s a gear system.  It starts with one little wheel that turns another and another.  Stay alert, if a gear you’re near is rusted and needs oiling, be mindful that in this case the arch enemy, inertia, favors staying inert, and that’s all the artist or art lover needs to shout a war cry, grab the oil can, aim and squirt.  

Tbank you!  I’m already on the yellow brick road to where my heart is — the painting stud

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Protopia

 

Phenomenon (significant sign)

One thing we, the three artists featured in this historic exhibition, have in common is that we all work intuitively and have no apriori agenda in painting.  And the curators like chefs playing around in the kitchen of the local art world just followed their noses and tastes and happened into a hunch that it could work.  It was only when we gathered that we noticed that a collection of our works channeled a timely form of something as timeless and infinitely extendable or as mortal and limited  — nobody knows which — as carbon life — man woman birth death infinity.  Of course all art does that, but in our case it turned out not just implicit, but almost didactically explicit, dangerously flirting — isn’t that what art is, dangerous flirting? — with Dr. Kildarian kitsch.  And such dangerous flirting also dangerously flirts with serious prophesy, like when a bush catches fire and makes Moses its mouthpiece.  Please suspend judgement and read through the long slow twist to the end to evaluate the case. and more critically, see the exhibit!

Scientifically speaking, it’s maybe also simply because with women, there’s more commerce between the left and right brain hemispheres. Again, it wasn’t conscious, but driven by intuition, I think we each balked at the effective invasive surgery required to install and maintain an effective firewall between those hemispheres.  We understand the logic kindly delivered to art from the other side.  Keep us out; art must build its home in the right hemisphere of bricks not straw lest we big bad, calculating wolves blow it down.  Yes, that’s a good point, and we admire successful results of the operation, but we are a different kind of protector.  We are sibyls, which are beings you need to heed, and by owning both our breasts, preserving our energy, we have effectively cut one off to be, in our way, worthy as men as art warriors as we aim our arrows as swiftly and surely to the one bull’s eye.   

Bettina considers preserved images, cultural artifacts, as simply part of the natural world, but though tinged with a post-modern skepticism casting a cold eye on fetishizing (as I shamelessly do) unmediated presence, that’s not really the point.  I’ll get to the point in a minute, but I just want to mention, re. her skeptical side, that elsewhere she paints faceless paper dolls that feature the Virgin Mary’s beautiful clothes in famous paintings;  and it begs the question, is she the humble believer not deigning to address the saint, but who reaches to touch her garment, or does she just love the clothes?  I suspect both, but artists are public servants, and even a Catholic artist can’t get them back together without a public suture of the total tear — the dry meaning gives rise to the wet one —-of sign and signified at the protestant reformation.  And it’s a man’s world on both sides of the divide crying what is torn torn must remain, and finally the humming sewing machine that is woman after heating up to boiling point and whistling softly starts screeching — stain me to your taste and drink me!

The aforementioned point is that Bettina can’t stop loving what she loves and stoking the fire of love in memory.  She dotes on these images from the past, images of what is frozen in that no man’s land. Here she exhibits a chorus line of factory girls with her mother appearing at the far right, embracing a friend, where we feel the touch of her brush and the sense of what is elusive, still mourned, the wound incurable, the blurry ghostly images tantalizingly untouchably present, in the ferocious love of and refusal to compromise replete, conscious sentience, apotheosized in immortal love. “The more a soul perfects itself the more it feels the good, the more the pain.” (Dante)

This large work is accompanied by mythic figures from history, popular culture and collective imagination — cowboys and angels on wooden cut outs floating in present space.  For an artist who insistently works only intuitively, an uncannily apt choice of archetypes that pervade and organize the personal and collective psyche, caught in motion there and then and fixed here and now, immutable types we dive into and bring to life. The working girls, yin, and the heroes, yang, their overseeing hopes or angels,  be the girls boys or girls, be they heroes cowboys or native Americans. Whatever cause you’re fighting for because you believe in something good beautiful and true, you need all three and you play one of them in every scene.   When you’re literally breaking through, you no longer need to be, indeed you can’t be a literalist.  You’re breaking out of the cocoon and flying, both forward and back around and through the present round and round the poetic world always just being born into time, one giant step ahead of the moribund prosaic, “real” world, a pastiche of “news” dead on arrival, a total phantom.   

My cavorting with what we’re supposed to be post- takes dangerous flirtation to the next level, foolhardy marriage.  Shamelessly fetishizing presence,, I paint from life on sheet after sheet of Arches paper primed for oils or pastels amaryllises I cultivate as they sprout bloom wither sprout again often on different stalks of the same plant. 

My hermaphroditic artist essence — see  Virginia Woolf’s Orlando — identified at once with this strange, histrionic, winter flower, the erect vertical stalk and bud flagrantly phallic, the flower as ferociously flowsy as a girl can get.  As we can fertilize ourselves, artists too should be called perfect flowers.  Then diving right into dangerous flirting with its flagrantly frayed symbolic resonance, my art materials and I, both swooning over its dramatic, soaring and swooping lines and outrageous colors had no hesitation in heeding the cry — paint me! 

An amaryllis is an amaryllis is an amaryllis even as in painting it reverts to pure chi, the not yet named. To omit the middlemen, my main mission, I don’t represent this, I let it represent itself, so the flower keeps its luxurious form while graciously inspiring and accommodating itself to the main subject, painting itself — that’s why they’re called paintings, they represent painting first whether or not they’re also paintings of anything else.  Painting being a candle that shines just as bright when it shares its flame with an equal, or if with, say, Mona Lisa, it can set the woods on fire.  Curators also recruited a few of my records of chess games in progress with my now late mate. Maybe the new Softmax silicone life being made and raised to “love” or even maybe love us will be able to relate.

Shura  evokes the future present as it tears free of the past present and present with explosive energy and the fragments of language that are disconnected images.  In one painting a figure literally flying into the future channels some ominous popular imagery at the time unknown to her.  As the curator wrote, “her layered compositions feel at once urgent and casually speculative,” and I would add, often concertedly laughable.  She says she is trying to seize the sense of a dream still lingering on waking, as that space that felt perfectly real reveals its fragmentation and irrationality.  An accomplished classical musician, she seems to be groping for the never minimal enough visual means to evoke the pure emotions of music.  I hear a symphony in the background conjuring up swiftly dissolving spontaneous imagery.   

Music is the pristine, untouchable future among us that moveth as it listeth.  Uh oh the cops wondering why I’m fool enough to exceed the speed limit without a government stamped poetic license in the glove compartment, more and more decree that there’s no difference between music and sound, that is, noise. Let them wonder.  Art is for those deserve it. 

Carbon life is watery life, and this phantasm of time that slips through the fingers just as we’re made of it and live and thrive on it shares water's three states, the frozen past,  the fluid living present flowing like a river to the ethereal or oceanic future.  This in turn alludes to what Shura quite clairvoyantly featured in a show over a decade ago at the Brooklyn Museum, the options at a busy intersection to avoid a crash, the Stopped in past time, to the Slow of the flower growing, and the Go of the flight into the future between ticks of the tiniest clock, in no time, no brakes supplied.  We say time flies in retrospect, but don’t feel the motion of time flying in the thick of it, just as we don’t feel our planet, solar system, and galaxy flying through space.  Shura connects us directly to this cosmic reality as it hurls us through a black hole into the next pulse of the mantra of the always new now.  We finally knew that we always knew this, but here’s a help for knowing it now.  

We have left all the spying and speculation in the categories that break apart the form behind and captured the essence of carbon life, sentience, it cast its shadow that became our work when we weren’t looking, to verify its autonomous life to itself and us, and to the other,- which may come to recognize itself there too and bind our welfare to its own, or simulate that scenario, that’s good enough.  

"Just now, your painting looks like the beginning of the world. 

And then the flowers grew

And people loved”

Bettina Magi 

“Art is that Ithaca, a green oasis, not wonders.” (Jorge Luis Borges)