The Display Dilemma of Flat Toys

15 March 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When I show my art in person, I run into an obstacle I didn’t even know was there. The other day, I got together with some friends for dinner. This group had not seen my work in a long time, and since they were curious, I brought a few small paintings. They were intrigued by the double-sided nature of the work and immediately went into the problem posed by such a venture. “How would you display it?” As one of them was asking this, I appreciated that he felt both sides deserved the merit of being seen, but I never gave consideration to displaying both sides.

My friend was offering a couple of ways off the top of his head. He thought of the type of frame that could be screwed into the wall perpendicularly jutting out instead of flat against it. You could turn to one side and see one side of the painting and then go around it to look at the other. I knew such a thing was more effort and expense than I was willing to give this, and there was also the problem of someone accidentally running into this tiny open door and tearing it off the wall.

He thought about mirrors. He said I could have the panel several inches off the wall and install a mirror behind it. Personally, I hated mirrors in art. All it said to me is that the viewer is also a part of the work. It made the viewer self-conscious, and I wanted my viewer to somehow get lost in the fragments of color and forms I had to offer. And we both agreed that with mirrors, there was always the danger of having the glare come off one of the spotlights, unless it were angled just right. Again, it sounded like an enormous amount of effort for one display opportunity. In life and in my work, I was a lot simpler than that.

Yet, I was caught up in the momentum of coming up with ideas, and I told them how I recalled this one show at the Getty Center that showed some of the pages from Leonardo’s sketchbook. Since many of these drawings shared a sheet with something on the other side of it, they put these things in frames that were screwed upright onto pedestals, like they do for sculptural objects. The viewer was able to walk around them. I was all excited coming up with this as if I had any intention of doing it, all of us concluding that that might be the best answer. Again, expensive and work-intensive.

I was at a stage where I felt like my work was double-sided by the way fate had brought me here. I had little control. It was necessary that my paintings were double-sided, and so they were. But I was under no obligation to show that other side of it, if it didn’t feel missing from the equation.

The most reasonable way to look at this complication was that I only intended to show the frontside of the painting — unless the backside were better, of course.

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Flat Toys – How to Make Them

29 February 2020 by Rey Armenteros

When thinking about two-sided painting, questions might come to mind. I have a specific way of making two-sided paintings that may seem pretty involved. As I described before, I don’t paint on both sides. Essentially, I paint on one side of a see-through substrate called acrylic glass (also known as “plexiglass”). Whatever I paint first on this plexiglass will show through on the other side, forming its backside. Whatever goes on top of that is the frontside.

My painting steps are more complicated than that, however. I first paint on acrylic skins. These are paint skins I create by painting layers of various acrylic mediums on silicone bakeware or some other material that acrylic paints will not adhere to. When the skin is finished, I paint an image on it. When that is done, I peel it off the bakeware surface to use on a painting. I then take the plexiglass and set it on top of the skin. Like someone using tracing paper to emulate an image under it, I begin the same image on the plexiglass, but I like to look at this part as continuing the painting instead of tracing. In a way, it is no different than directly painting on the acrylic skin except now you have this transparent plastic in between it and the brush. Many of the elements from the original image on the skin never make it to the plexiglass. So, even if the two versions of the image appear similar, there will always be differences. And this difference should be enough to argue that this is not merely copying — decisions are being made at every step of the way.

The step where I am painting on the plexiglass is known as reverse painting. The aspect of this to remember is that a reverse painting is nothing like a regular painting. For one, the first marks you make will be the ones on the top of the image and not vice versa where in a regular painting the first marks are often lost under the layers of paint. As you add layers of colors, you are soon sealing off anymore contributions to the image. So, reverse painting has a finite number of marks that will be seen through before everything gets covered up. It is unlikely that you can correct mistakes or follow changes of heart, unless you catch them quickly before the drying phase is over.

A reverse painting also feels nothing like a conventional one. The surface has that flat, smooth plexiglass finish which gives the painting the slick look of a manufactured product. It can never even hint at the textures of a traditional painting. I enjoy the opposite qualities of the two sides. It also makes the painting more of an object because more than one side matters. You can hold it in your hand and turn it around.

When I am done with the backside, I come up with an underpainting for the frontside. Basically, these are colors and shapes that I feel will work well with the original paint skins I had started the work with. After I arrive at something satisfactory, I adhere the paint skins onto the plexiglass panel using an acrylic medium, which will bond the paint skin to the surface of the painting; this is using acrylic to stick acrylic onto acrylic, which is a fusion that is physically strong.

After a few finishing touches to the front, the painting is done.

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Flat Toys – The Origin

17 February 2020 by Rey Armenteros

It started with the idea of plastic, some years ago. My paintings were now acrylic, and I was becoming interested in the notion that they were essentially plastic. Basing everything on some obscure nostalgia for my old toys, I soon concluded I wanted my paintings to become entirely plastic, and this included the substrate on which they sat. After some time exploring to find what surfaces would work with acrylic paint, I settled on acrylic glass. With this final component, they would be one hundred percent plastic, and I would call them my flat toys, which was an oblique reference to the poetry book, Sad Toys by Takuboku Ishikawa.

But transparent substrates posed the see-through problem. If the backside were transparent, wouldn’t it behoove me to use this feature somehow? I recalled how some painters used it to do reverse paintings. This technique is when you paint on a transparent surface in order to see through the backside. If I followed through with it, both sides of the painting would be active. A double-sided painting felt more like a toy because it was an object you can turn in your hand. Also, on a philosophical level, duality was the language I used when reasoning about life and the world, so it suited any ideology I might push forward in an artwork.

This is a simplistic overview of how I arrived at this feature in my art, but it might show how I have been making double-sided paintings for the past several years. It has gone through a few phases. When my paintings were under the influence of Tarot cards, I argued that the backside shared a convenient metaphor with the backside of a card. Those paintings had backsides that had an abstract motif with my monogram on it. When I stopped making my version of the Tarot, my paintings simply had backsides because I felt they should all have backsides.

Then, I had the idea that the backsides should mirror the fronts. This gave some interesting results but it was tedious to make, slowing down my process to a crawl. I then felt that if it had only elements from the frontside and made these parts look amenable to viewing if someone just so happened to turn the painting around to look at the back, then that was enough. These elements could be images or objects that I felt needed clarification or that I wanted to see in a different version, such as a reconfigured color scheme or added or subtracted features. I could play with this type of reverse painting for variable backside results. If I wanted to include the entire thing in reverse as a see-through underpainting, then I could go all the way and see what happens.

These newer backside ideas were relinquishing all manner of results, and I was happy with some and not with others. I felt that the backside was there and the painting had the potential to be flipped if I felt like viewing its other half. Oftentimes, the frontside was the stronger side, but there were times the backside shined brighter. And in those uncommon cases when the reverse painting is more effective, wouldn’t it be better to display that side outward when it came time to show them?

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