I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you.

Paul Cézanne 1

The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this disconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art work, the truth of what is has set itself to work. Art is truth setting itself to work. What is truth itself, that it sometimes comes to pass as art?

Martin Heidegger 2

"I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you." What does it mean for Cézanne, for any painter, to write this, to say this? As Jacques Derrida notes, 3 it is a performative speech act, a promise of payment of a debt, that follows the first promise with another performative speech act. The constative speech act 4 that would fulfill this promise does not follow; Cézanne does not tell Emile Bernard "the truth in painting." At least Cézanne does not do the telling in the text of the sentence in question; his doing the telling in his paintings is another matter. Leaving Cézanne aside, what is truth that it is connected with painting?

There are three theories of truth. The correspondence theory of truth regards a proposition as true if it corresponds to what is the case. The coherence theory of truth regards a proposition as true if it is a necessary constituent of a systematically coherent whole. The pragmatic theory of truth regards a proposition as true if its satisfactory working has been verified by such conditions as may be stipulated. These theories of truth are predicable of logical propositions. It is not too far to connect truth, and the theories of the nature of truth, with painting, which notwithstanding everything else it is (and that is very much indeed) also entails something like a proposition insofar as painting is the facture of a "thought-thing," as Hannah Arendt terms art5 works: thought given material sensible form.

One might apply the correspondence theory of truth to painting by positing the relationship between a painting qua representation and what it represents as being true if the painting is adequate, thus alluding to the classical formulation of the correspondence theory as adequatio rei et intellectus. 6 This might seem on superficial reflection to obtain only for representational painting, and to necessarily entail a simplistic version of a mimetic theory of art; further reflection will demonstrate otherwise. One might apply the coherence theory of truth to painting as analogous to the notion of unity, or wholeness of the work, a component condition of beauty at least since the Greek notion of symmetria and the medieval notion of unitas. 7 One might apply the pragmatic theory of truth to painting as a correlative of Gestalt closure, saying simply, on encountering a painting, "It works." But so simply putting the matter leaves much to be said.

Wittgenstein wrote: "To understand a proposition means to know what the case is, if the proposition is true." 8 Thus, understanding a proposition is knowing its meaning, and the meaning of a proposition is the conditions under which the proposition is true. This does not entail that the proposition is true, but rather entails what the necessary truth conditions of the proposition would be if it were true. If one applies that to painting, the way is open to the truth in painting being much more than a simplistic understanding of mimesis, of a mere relation of similitude between representation and represented. The way is open to an understanding of painting, of artworks, as a setting forth of a world. "Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force." 9 The world opened by the work is a possible world. The poiesis of the facture of the work is no less an act of the imagination than it is an act of perception. That is not to say that as such it is less 'real'. As Gaston Bachelard asked, "And why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?" 10

Juvenal Reis has written: "I have used the dual view I have about the world: the lies we tell and the truth we have to hide as metaphors in my work." 11 The concept of truth Reis evokes is not that of doxa, of correctness of correspondence, but rather a Heideggerian conception of truth as aletheia, a disconcealing. 12 Painting is an act of facture that entails temporal duration: the painting does not come to be all at once, but through the cumulative sedimentation of markings. It would be possible, though it would be highly unusual, for each mark to be so placed as not to overlay another, previous mark. The cumulative layering of marks one over the other provides a ready metaphor, at the level of material cause of the painting, for concealing and revealing. Thus the layering of the paint in Private Scape # 5, with the thin, wash-like underpainting a stain beneath the opaque knife-dragged opaque white passages; likewise in Unborn Thought and the orange glaze in Bad Seed: Orange Coat.

The works in the Strange Dialogue series cover intaglio prints with oil enamel, collage and embedded horsehair. The desaturated, nearly grisaille color of buff titanium and cool chromatic gray and black (with small, subtle touches of red in Strange Dialogue # 13 and of pale yellow in Strange Dialogue # 11) of these four works reference the monochromatic substrate of the intaglio print while occluding it; only the platemark remains visible to make the intaglio origin explicit.

Employing a rhetoric of temporal specificity in opposition to the putative rhetoric of timelessness of historical abstraction, 13 Reis stipulates the temporal situation of facture explicitly in the titles 14 of the six Strange Scapes series of works in the exhibition. The rhetoric of timelessness is a conceit underwriting an essentialism of pure formal elements founding a claim of universalism; Reis instead evokes a conditional historicity founding a claim of particularity of the engagement of a sensibility in its situatedness. That this engagement is temporal in its particularity is manifest in the titling of these works to include the date, indicative of the journal character of the works as a daily practice of the painter Apelles' maxim: "Nulla die sine linea." 15 That this engagement is spatial in its particularity is manifest in the titling of these works to manifest in the shift from Dallas to Cologne.

The situatedness of a sensibility entails the agency of a self as the efficient cause of the artwork. The notion of the self, and the privileging of the individual against the collectivity in cultural production, are central to modernist praxis, and central to postmodernism as objects of devalorization. 16 These works by Juvenal Reis suggest that the personal search by the individual artist, a central presupposition of modernism, has not been entirely consigned to the dustbin of history, the last few decades of the discourses of postmodernism notwithstanding. That is worth remarking on, as it perhaps seems remarkable that a painter would posit an entrance 17 that thus extends the enterprise by a return to painterly abstraction with its historically associated ambition. In Reis' works, there is the ambition inherent in the large scale of Study For a Drawing and Bad Seed: Milk Mother. But ambition is not simply a matter of large scale: the intimately scaled Strange Dialogue: Blue, Strange Dialogue: Yellow, Strange Dialogue: Natural, Strange Dialogue: White seem to allude to the endgame of abstraction, first played out by Rodchenko, 18 and subsequently recapitulated by Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, and Gerhard Richter, among others.19 It is not incidental that Barnett Newman titled those works engaging Rodchenko's move Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue? It is significant that Newman, Johns and Richter risk engaging Rodchenko's move, as Reis also seems to do: to do so is to engage something dangerous, something that has the sense of risking an ending about it. Risk, too, is a central trope of modernist praxis. Yve-Alain Bois has suggested that the modernist search for the absolute as a discourse of motivation for the enterprise ends in one of two ways: Rodchenko's monochromes and the quitting of the enterprise, or Duchamp's full acceptance of the failure. 20 The horns of this seeming dilemma are not exhaustive of the possibilities. There is always the possibility of a reinstauration of the search, even knowing, indeed necessarily knowing, what has transpired in the course of the praxis of painting and the discursive fields in which that praxis is embedded during the last century. So perhaps it is not remarkable: increasingly of late, postmodernism seems to have assumed a position more as history than as constituting current practice. More precisely, some versions of postmodernism seem less relevant to current practice, as some versions of modernism seem less relevant to current practice, while elements of both modernism and postmodernism perdure, sublated in a continuing dialectic. As Rosalind Krauss has remarked, "To wish to paint the operations of the dialectic is no small ambition." 21 It is not at all remarkable, for as Gerhard Richter has remarked, "Painting was my attempt to explore what painting is still able and permitted to do." 22 The enterprise is always that.

Born in Nova Améérica, Goiás, Brazil, Juvenal Reis received the Bachelor of Arts in Advertising from Casper Libero-School of Social Communications São Paulo, Brazil, and the Master of Science from Florida International University, Miami. Reis received the Master of Fine Arts in painting from Southern Methodist University. Recent exhibitions include: Centro Cultural Paulista, SESC, Servicio Sociál do Comercia, São Paulo, SP, Brazil, 2000; Juvenal Reis, Mesquite Art Center, Mesquite, Texas, 2000; Assemblage 1999, Irving Arts Center, Irving, Texas, 1999; Juvenal Reis: New Work, Dallas Public Library, 1999; Ora pro nobis, Dallas Visual Arts Center, 1998.

1. Paul Cézanne, letter to Emile Bernard, October 23, 1905. Quoted in Jacques Derrida, "Passe-Partout," The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 2. Cited in Hubert Damisch, "Huit thèses pour (ou contre?) une sémiologie de la peinture," Macula 2 (1977). Return
2. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," The Origin of the Work of Art, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 39. Return
3. Jacques Derrida, "Passe-Partout," The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian Mcleod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 3. Return
4. Constative utterances posit accountability to the actuals of an objective world. Performative utterances are circumstantial, contingent on the conditions of utterance rather than being predicated on a reality underlying all conditions. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 198. For the urtexts of speech-at theory, see John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), and J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Return
5. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971, 1977, 1978), p. 62. Return
6. "Adequation of the intellect and thing." Return
7. For Greek aesthetics, a useful commentary with selected texts is J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); see p. 162 for symmetria, 'symmetry' by which is meant the 'commensurability of parts' and not symmetry as its commonplace English sense. For medieval aesthetics, useful works in the secondary literature are Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) and Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Return
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.024. Trans. C. K. Ogden. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922, 1933). Return Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," The Origin of the Work of Art, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 44. Return
9. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 158. Return
10. Juvenal Reis, Artist's Statement, Spring 1999. Return
11. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," The Origin of the Work of Art, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 27-87. Return
12. See Tom Huhn and Georgia Marsh, "(A) History of New Abstract Painting: Toward a Theory of Domestic Abstraction," Art Criticism 11:1, online at http://www.creview.com/artcrit/ac3huh.htm. Return
13. See Hazard Adams, "Titles, Titling, and Entitlement To," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46:1 (Fall 1987), 7-21. Return
14. "No day without a line." In Pliny, Hist. Nat., 35.36.84; n. c, vol. IX in the Harvard ed., p. 322. Return
15. Inter alia, see Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Return
16. For the notion of 'entrance', see George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 6-7. Return
17. I am taking Reis' Strange Dialogue: Natural as if 'Natural' were a surrogate for red, which visually and conceptually it seems to be. Strange Dialogue: White, in Reis' quartet is the alterity of the combination of red, yellow, and blue, as also in Robert Ryman's white paintings. Rodchenko's three monochromes, Chistyi krasnyi tsvet (Pure Red Color), Chistyi zheltyi tsvet (Pure Yellow Color), and Chistyi sinii tsvet (Pure Blue Color), were exhibited in the September 1921 exhibition 5 x 5 = 25, held at the Klub userossis kogo soiuza poetov, Club of the All-Russia Union of Poets, Moscow. Rodchenko wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition: "At the present exhibition for the first time in art the three primary colors are declared." Quoted in John Milner, "Material Values: Alexander Rodchenko and the end of abstract art," in ed. David Elliott, Rodchenko and the Arts of Revolutionary Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 50-54, [reprint of exhibition catalogue Alexander Rodchenko, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford]. Later, Rodchenko remarked "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation." Quoted in online resources for the exhibition Aleksandr Rodchenko, Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 25 - October 6, 1998 at http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/rodchenko/texts/death_of_painting.html . Return
18. E.g., Barnett Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? I, 1966, oil on canvas, 75 x 48 inches, coll. S. I. Newhouse, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? II, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 102, coll. Annalee Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? III, 1966-67, oil on canvas, 96 x 214, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? IV, acrylic on canvas, 1969-70, 108 x 238, coll. Annalee Newman; Jasper Johns, Diver, oil on canvas with objects, 90 x 170, Albert A. List Family coll., According to What, oil on canvas with objects, 88 x 192, coll. Edwin James; Gerhard Richter, Red Yellow Blue, No. 333/5, 1972, oil on canvas, 251 x 200 cm., Crex Coll., Hallen für neue Kunst, Stuttgart. Return
19. Yve-Alain Bois, "The Noncompositional Strategy From Malevich to Minimalism," lecture at the University of Texas at Dallas, 16 April 1998. Return
20. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1983), p. 237. Return
21. Gerhard Richter, "Interview With Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984," in Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995), p. 114. Return