Post-Certainty in Cultural Context
We’re living in a time that performs certainty at every turn—answers delivered instantly, confidence faked at scale. But the ground has shifted. What I’m seeing, and sensing in so many conversations, is that wholeness no longer feels believable. That’s what I mean by post-certainty.
For me, post-certainty isn’t about AI—it’s about what AI exposes. Completion has become suspicious. Overconfidence is a red flag. The cultural moment is no longer defined by what we know, but by how we live with what we can’t.
This doesn’t feel like decline. It feels like a necessary correction. A collective admission that no single frame can hold the full picture.
Structural Omission as Response
This is the context I paint within. I’m not trying to resolve anything—I’m building structures that leave space for what remains unresolved. That’s what structural omission means to me: an image that holds tension, not resolution. A narrative that invites reading but resists conclusion.
The absences in my work aren’t decorative. They aren’t errors. They’re structural.
My paintings begin with rupture. I don’t make something whole and then fracture it. I never paint the full story and then decide to subtract. What’s missing was never there—and that’s the point.
This isn’t about layering abstraction over realism. It’s about embedding ambiguity into the foundation. Every omission is a compositional decision. Every fracture holds meaning.
Painting in the Age of Post-Certainty
We don’t need more finished images. We need more honest ones.
AI is trained to resolve, to predict, to flatten contradiction. But painting—real painting—can hold contradiction without collapsing it. It can let the unknown stay unknown.
Painting doesn’t need to compete with the machine. It needs to do what the machine can’t: preserve the parts we’ll never fully understand.
Conclusion
I’ve been working with these ideas, post-certainty and structural omission, for years. I coined both terms to describe what I saw missing in how we talk about realism, representation, and meaning. If you’re encountering them here for the first time, it’s because this is where they began. This essay, along with the linked pieces below, forms the foundation of a conceptual framework I developed to describe a different way of making—and seeing—contemporary painting.
Post-certainty isn’t a theme I’ve chosen; it’s the air we’re breathing. Structural omission is how I paint inside that atmosphere.
In a culture that fills in every blank, I leave some space open. Because the full story doesn’t exist. And the art that pretends otherwise is lying.