ROMA²
Miltos Manetas                                                                                                                                                 09.2009

In 2002, I was invited to participate in a group show that was put together at the newly-created Contemporary Art Museum. I offered a few of my paintings but they were rejected. "We prefer  something more contemporary" I was told. "Video, installations, photographs, maybe a website". The fact that my paintings were not produced a century ago didn't seem to register with the specialists. Painting is considered an obsolete technology, like travelling with horses instead of cars and airplanes.
Apparently, in Art as in Transport, moving information as far as possible and at the maximum speed and ease is essential. Things should arrive at their destination unchanged; a chair should remain a chair, a masterpiece should stay a masterpiece, beauty and common sense need to be kept intact and under control. In this context, Painting -the most ambiguous of the arts as well as the least explicit- is quite a crime.

Oil on canvas painting was in fact invented around 1300 at the time of the Big Doubt, arriving together with all kinds of ideas that poisoned the certainties about reality. Suddenly, our Earth stopped being flat, the Sun became just a normal star and human beings succeeded in looking at themselves from the outside-something that until then was God's privilege. In addition, a generation of canvasses were produced, made by extremist artists, wolves in sheep’s clothing who began to decorate the churches with their explosive concepts.

Today it’s the job of official culture to reconstruct the coherence of reality. Sponsored by public and private money, Art is supposed to fill the empty spot left by Churches that have become in their turn mere tourist destinations. In this sublime equilibrium between authority and creativity, Painting is a black swan and would have been eliminated had this been possible. Talking about transport, painting takes us in all directions but it does so either with unimaginable speed or with exasperating slowliness. It cannot be controlled.

Yorgo Manis is one of the very few young artists who are exploring the possibility of Painting in unimaginable places. Street View by Google -which Manis paints- is the latest level of complexity applied to the World. Street View makes reality even more complex, it simulates our cities in photographic detail and explores them like a videogame. In this way, Rome becomes ROMA². While the World computes itself on multiple levels of simulation, Painting captures the World, serving it back to us, destroying our preconceptions about it without ever trying to explain it.