Against Catharsis: Painting in a Post-Certainty Era

I paint to witness something not as it was, not as it’s remembered, but as it resists being pinned down at all. That stance matters more to me than offering resolution or catharsis. It is not that I dismiss it entirely. It is that I no longer trust the idea that resolution equals truth.

The idea that art should heal, soothe, or provide insight often emerges from a well-meaning place. But when it becomes the dominant lens, especially around figurative work that engages intimacy, trauma, or identity, it risks turning every painting into a mechanism for moral closure. That’s not the space I work in.

As Lauren Berlant wrote in Cruel Optimism,

“A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”

(Note to self: I recognize this all too clearly.)

The desire for narrative, meaning, and emotional reward is deeply human. But when art is expected to perform those functions reliably, to resolve our feelings for us, or to deliver takeaway truths, it becomes something smaller than it could be. Something safer. More instrumental. Less alive.

I paint from the conditions that remain active.

Jacques Rancière argued that art does not need to deliver a message, only to produce a new configuration of the visible and the sayable. Not a moral. A shift. A tension. A reordering of how we have been trained to perceive..

Structural Omission was formed in that space. Not as a refusal to engage, but as a different kind of engagement. One that builds form without resolution. Access without false certainty. Representation without manufactured clarity. I am not offering closure. I am offering structure that makes visible the limits of what can be known.

Still, I know the work can trigger a narrative reflex. We are conditioned, trained even, to search for coherence, meaning, and resolution. And if someone finds that in my work, that is fine. I do respect their experience. But that is not what the painting was built to do. The impulse may be theirs; the architecture is mine, not to dictate meaning, but to hold space for the recognition that the complete story was never there to begin with.

That distinction matters.

Because in a culture increasingly exhausted by spectacle, trauma cycles, and meaning overload, Structural Omission is not an absence of position. It is built. It is deliberate. It is a different kind of architecture, one that presents form without pretending that the full story can be captured.

Some realities will never deliver themselves in full. Structural Omission is my architecture for holding that fact in plain view.