Aline Verstraten paints, reads and writes. Currently, she is a PhD Researcher at PXL-MAD School of Arts and University of Hasselt. The topic is “The Withdrawing Image. An Artistic Research into the Active Resistance of Painting as Medium”. In this research, she examines the critical potential of certain images that not only withdraw, but draw the viewer along with them.
While contemporary visual culture is characterised by transparency and immediacy, this research aims to show how certain images have the potential to counteract this tendency. Transparency and immediacy are closely connected with (over)consumption and rapid technological advancements, which hide their impact on our mental, societal and climatological well-being. Withdrawing images, then, shift the focus to what cannot be immediately consumed, to their materiality and to a slowed-down appraisal.
The withdrawing quality of such images is explored through a collection of art philosophical essays and a series of paintings. The essays are built on (visual) metaphors to approach the withdrawing quality of several artworks across history from various angles. In Aline Verstraten’s artistic practice, the specific role of painting as medium in the possible emergence of the withdrawing quality is explored.
This research shows that withdrawing images are able to provide a new way of looking at images in general, one that does not aim to “grasp” an image immediately but requires sitting with it for a prolonged period of time. The hope is that by slowing down our rapid consumption of images, we regain some much-needed mental space, and by slowing down our vast production of images, we can have a positive impact on our physical surroundings.
