Addicted to Endings: Why closure is a cultural drug, and why my paintings refuse to provide it.

The Culture of Endings

We live in a culture addicted to endings.

Every Netflix series is engineered for the cliffhanger. Every news headline promises the final revelation — the scandal that will “finally” explain everything — until the next one takes its place. If you’ve ever scrolled hoping the next headline will finally explain it all, you know the drug I’m talking about.

Closure has become a cultural drug.

But in a post-certainty era, closure doesn’t necessarily represent truth.

The last decade ripped the floor out from under us: the collapse of shared truth, the acceleration of misinformation, the rise of AI smoothing everything into bland coherence. Narrative has become a trap. What we call closure is pretending to be certainty, comfort in the face of complexity.

From Realist Mastery to the Myth of a Complete Image

Painting, especially representational painting, has long been treated as a site of resolution: the completed likeness, the captured scene, the finished narrative. I reject that. Even after years of mastering those very skills.

Painting has long promised wholeness. George Bellows froze New York streets into decisive scenes. Robert Henri urged artists to “paint life as it is.” The market still rewards paintings that feel airtight: edges resolved, beauty polished, allegories sealed. Yet painters such as Jenny Saville and Alyssa Monks have pulled realism toward psychological tension and perceptual doubt. Saville turns flesh into something simultaneously intimate and unsettled. Monks collapses space until perception itself wavers. Luc Tuymans shows how ambiguity and indeterminacy can carry meaning. His restrained, fragmentary realism erodes the expectation of a complete picture. My work builds on that trajectory but makes incompleteness structural — not unfinished, but acknowledging that the painting can never be whole.

Structural Omission

In my practice, I call this Structural Omission, a framework in contemporary realist painting that makes the limits of seeing and knowing visible. It rests on three ideas: every act of seeing is partial; what’s left out is load-bearing, not surface effect; and stories can be provoked without ever closing. The work accepts that no single, authoritative story can be known or completed.

Because the whole story does not exist. Pretending otherwise is cultural self-deception.

Beyond Closure

Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is never total; we see only in fragments, through shifting horizons, never from all sides at once.

Ludwig Wittgenstein pressed further: meaning is not anchored in some hidden truth but in language’s use, contextual, contingent, always incomplete.

And if science is your flavor, neuroscience shows that perception is not a direct recording of reality but a reconstruction. Our brains stitch together sensory input, prior assumptions, and stored memories into something that only feels coherent. That is our “reality.”

Structural Omission stands on this ground, extending the logic of the post-certainty era into painting itself. This is not ambiguity for its own sake. It is clarity about limits. Every image, every story, every archive is incomplete, not because the artist withholds, but because the world itself is partial, fragmented, inaccessible in its totality.

In that sense, painting is more honest than the algorithm. Algorithms exist to seal gaps, to finish your sentence, to supply the ending. Painting, at least my painting, shows that the gaps were always structural. The hunger for closure is the problem. Meaning is richer, stranger, and more alive when it resists being wrapped up with a bow.

Structural Omission is not just a painting framework. It is a position, a refusal to pretend that the full story is ever available, and a commitment to making that incompleteness visible.

We do not need more conclusions. We need work that stays open, truthful, demanding, alive.

You might also like: The Artist Doesn’t Know My own short unwillingness to pretend any of us have it figured out.