Structural Omission vs. Narrative Closure

At some point, someone taught us that the story begins.
A clean start. A rupture. An unanticipated twist.
Voids that can’t be ignored or explained.
And the inevitable reckoning—because sitting with the unresolved is unbearable for most.

I’ve watched people choose collapse, confrontation, performance, self-erasure—anything but acceptance. The unknown is terrifying, but slightly less so if you can overexplain it with confidence. Almost anything is easier than accepting the fact that, right beside what we think we understand, life holds vast quantities of the unknowable.

Still, we want it. We crave it. The setup. The why. The moment when everything changes. It’s how we’re taught to understand meaning: the story has to start somewhere. And if we can name the start, we can maybe name the shape of what follows.

Aristotle gave us the structure: beginnings, middles, and ends.
Barthes dismantled the author’s control, opening the text to multiple, simultaneous readings. Joan Didion made a life’s work of showing how the narrative we think we’re living collapses under its own weight.

Structural Omission lives at the fault line between these positions—acknowledging the structures we’ve inherited, dismantling the illusion of totality, and accepting that what’s absent isn’t hidden; it was beyond our perception and understanding from the start.

Structural Omission is a framework I originated that structures representational painting around omissions as compositional architecture — load-bearing absences that reveal the limits of perception, narrative, and knowing.

That’s the lure of narrative. That if we just trace it far enough back or render it cleanly enough forward, it will cohere. The whole thing will snap into place. A plot will emerge. A resolution will reward us.

That has tot been my experience. And it is reflected in my work.

I don’t blur the line between realism and abstraction to create mystery. I don’t disrupt the figure so that you’ll squint harder to understand it. I’m not teasing you with something whole that’s been broken. I work from the position that wholeness was never there to begin with.

Structural Omission describes what happens when the very idea of narrative breaks down. It acknowledges that resolution isn’t just unreachable, it is structurally impossible.

“A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
— Aristotle, Poetics

Aristotle laid out the terms: a beginning, a middle, and an end. That structure still governs how we make meaning. The arc. The build. The payoff. For him, the point of tragedy was catharsis—a purging of emotion through recognition and release.

“Tragedy is an imitation of an action… with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions.”
— Aristotle, Poetics

That model persists. In novels. In therapy. In grant applications. In how we talk about grief. The story is expected to move. To arc. To arrive.

But what if the story doesn’t arc? What if it loops, or frays, or doubles back on itself, forgets where it was going, then stops? Not for effect, but because knowing and perception has limits.

“Narrative is simply a hierarchy of enigmas.”
— Roland Barthes, S/Z

Roland Barthes dismantled this architecture. In S/Z, he calls narrative a code something we read as meaningful only because we’ve been trained to want its resolution. A question posed, a question answered. Closure dressed up as revelation.

He names this the hermeneutic code, the mechanism of suspense and satisfaction that underlies all traditional storytelling. I believe this applies to storytelling in all its forms, lived and witnessed.

Where they diagnose narrative collapse in language, my practice shows how realism itself enacts that collapse on the canvas

My framework and paintings disable that code.

They don’t offer a clean arc or a guaranteed conclusion. They present technical precision interrupted by contradiction, clarity destabilized. They invite the instinct to interpret—while making visible the structural limits of that instinct. (I know. It almost looked like it was going somewhere. I built it that way.)

This is not narrative play. It is not surrealism. It is not a gesture toward something left unsaid.

Structural Omission is an architectural response to our perceptual limits, mine and yours. It does not suggest that meaning is elsewhere. It makes clear that complete meaning was never available.

Sometimes I render a figure so fully it feels undeniable, then disrupt it with something that breaks the frame. A rupture that is not expressive, but structural. A reminder that what you think you’re seeing may not hold.

“What the author thinks he is saying and what he is actually saying are not the same thing.”
— Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

That is true of painters too. The full story is not just unavailable to the viewer. It is unavailable to the maker. That is the condition I work within.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album

Joan Didion understood the impulse behind narrative. And she understood its cost.

Narrative does not just organize experience. It contains it. Compresses it. It creates the appearance of order where none exists.

My paintings do not disrupt narrative. They begin where the narrative no longer holds.

The viewer is not invited to decode. They encounter the breakdown of their own narrative reflex. That breakdown is not a theme. It is the subject.

Structural Omission is not an aesthetic stance. It is a structural account of what perception cannot resolve. If the work resists completion, it is because the conditions that enable completion are no longer present.

We’re surrounded by systems trained to simulate wholeness. AI-generated texts, algorithmic storytelling, digital “realities” stitched together to feel seamless and complete. Everything snaps into place so easily now. The arc is built for us—clean, persuasive, and false.

It soothes us, comforts us, and also fractures us.

That’s exactly why this work matters now. Because the most radical act might be to show what can’t be resolved. To build structures that acknowledge the limits of perception, rather than conceal them with polish and closure.

I came up with Structural Omission to name what I was doing in my work. How I was experiencing the world around me. What wasn’t being named.

This framework was not borrowed or absorbed. It was experienced and expressed through my painting and writing.

If you’re engaging with it, you are entering a system that has grown in real time out of my own observations of how I experience the world and my best ability to express it.

In a moment when museums are rethinking how they present history and lived experience, Structural Omission offers a framework for resisting the false wholeness of dominant narratives. It aligns with contemporary curatorial work that challenges linear storytelling—whether in rehangs of permanent collections or in commissions that foreground multiplicity over resolution. In realism especially, where completion is often equated with truth, this shift is urgent.

Because life does not begin, rise, and resolve.
And the full story never exists.