Devin Ratheal

Painter and teacher. I am deeply interested in the idea that perception, experience itself, is a negotiation between expectation and sensation. That is, I see perception itself as a creative act, neither passively received nor wholly projected. I hope to engage viewers with the productive uncertainty of their perception, highlighting the ongoing entanglement of conceptualization and sensual receptivity present in any engagement with imagery.

My current paintings offer up the overt and covert conditioning elements in Renaissance and Baroque paintings, their recognizable motifs and symbols as well as the logic of the pictorial spaces that ground them, to be experienced as being created in the act of seeing them. That is, the easily visible (figures/themes), the implied (cultural narratives), and the obscured (Cartesian space) which the viewer seems to see all-at-once in viewing the original, are sought out and perceived by the viewer. In the absence of a coherent spatial construction, and without a stabilizing focal point, areas of relative density of visual information replace focal points with whirlpools. There is no pictorial ground on which the eyes can rest, a persistent movement over and across the wave patterns in the image is the consistency offered. Nor is there an overt conceptual grounding for the paintings. Forced into an unstable mode of viewing, the viewer is more consciously engaged with their participation in the construction of the different layers of content in the original. This mode of investigation places the viewer in a more immediate relationship to particular instantiations of the creative multiplicity of perception.