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Mark that pervades mark tansey’s canvases can

Mark Tansey is an American Contemporary Artist,  born in 1949 in San Jose, California. He was born and raised in family of art historians and in 1972, he received his Bachelor from the “ Art Center College of Design” in Los Angeles. From 1975 to 1978, He finished his Master studies in painting at “ Hunter College” in New York. Mark Tansey is very well-known for his allegorical and monochromatic works inspired by a special surrealist artist “ René Magritte” . By her influence, he also creates detailed allegories that has an extremely deep meaning in art and demonstrates the mystery of the human desire to make images that draw of thinkers, historical themes, and literary. Tansey’s painting subjects are amazingly surreal scenes in which conceptual art theories are adopted. Its often completed with characters and people drawn from history.

Mark Tansey’s works and paintings has been the subjects of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including “ Paintings,” Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1984); “ Image World: Art and Media Culture,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989); Kunsthalle Museum, Basel (1990); “ Art and Source (curated by Patterson Sims),” Seattle Art Museum, Washington (1990, traveled to Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri; and much more. The concentrated imagery that pervades Mark Tansey’s canvases can be a trove of visual materials he has sourced and collected over the years, it can include photographs he took himself, clippings from magazines, journals and newspapers. Tansey begins his creative imagery process by stretching, placing, cropping or rotating, combining images, and photocopy or scan them until he produces a collage that that pictures his concept and preliminary study for his paintings. His paintings become world or scene of impossible and irregular juxtapositions of time and place. Also, they are complicated meditations on the interaction of illusion, reality, and representation.

Tansey’s artworks characterise the complexity of this century, when certainty seems more difficult to find than ever. In his paintings, it is difficult to identify the scenes whether its east or west, up or down, left or right, and good or evil. The figurative is the literal, and the literal is the figurative, all mixed up. Tansey embraces this mystery and invites the viewer to participate in his visual and metaphorical adventure through his paintings. All his works are Tansey’s conviction that our conception of “ reality” is determined by the tools we use to represent and communicate experience such as words, photographs, and painted images, and these descriptions are invariably incomplete, contradictory, and deceptive. Mark Tansey is an artist concerned with bridging the gap between fiction and reality, and we all can refer the        ” White on White” painting as his working through contradictory ideas came up from his attempt.  His image source materials are from National Geographic photographs, but the interaction that he put into the two groups is a total mystery and fantasy. It is a painting combined with oppositions such as Inuits and Bedouins, north and south, east and west, dog and camel, arctic and desert, and snow & sand.

Yet these incongruities and contradiction in cultures, weather and places are masked by Tansey’s monochromatic style or technique in painting. The Inuits transported on dogsleds; the Arabs crossed the desert on camels. They didn’t turn away from the fierce winds as they turns into each other.

Even if you focus on both their clothing and fur to show the winds are blowing in opposite directions. “ It happens to be that there is an invisible rift down the center of the picture, where cultures collide”. They must now decide whether or not to cross the barrier but they seem to be searching for something and yet we don’t know because its incomplete scene. The snow and the sand are indistinguishable from one another, which makes both time and place in one unified space.

Either the differences in clothing and  the directions of the wind are not apparently distinguish the extremities of temperature as Tansey says, “ as monochrome does not verify heat or cold, the unity of the space is maintained”. However, the challenge to create a unified space within the canvas itself, through his very subject matter and attempt, Tansey creates a rift down the center of the picture where both the distant continents collide and merge. His painting simultaneously seeks the ideological erasure of difference of cultures and constitutes “ a visual pun which suggests that these opposite constitute polarities that cannot be reconciled” (Taylor, p 55). The truly irreconcilable is the painting can both highlight and whitewash difference, which was a great challenge for Tansey to do and pose to his audience.

We can ask our-selfs ” Can the lines between fiction and reality be blurred to such an extent that they do not seem to exist ? , these questions that come to our minds are exactly the questions Tansey wants the viewer to think, stating: “ I’ve been reading things about catastrophe, chaos and complexity theory. It’s fascinating to go to another field where there is this explosion of kinds of visual order. These scientists are dealing with the problems of the difference between representations and the world as it is. And they are coming to an understanding of the importance of metaphor.” The son of two art historians, he was clearly busy with history and critical perception, which is  evidenced by naming the title of this piece from Kasimir Malevich’s famous “ White on White”.

Through his artworks, he drew contemporary art historians attention to draw a comparisons to Joseph Cornell, Réne Magritte, and Jasper Johns. The very mystery of his layered images placed his painting as a method of questioning incomplete scenes. The “ White on White” painting illustrates this imagery tension by presenting a realistic depiction of an impossibility.

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