Fashion and Flattery.

Many people would acknowledge the Renaissance period of the 15th and 16th centuries as a significant cultural age, as characterised by such key painters as Raphael or Clara Peeters, for example.

The Renaissance was notable in that it marked a revival in learning, an increased awareness of nature, representations of Humanism, exploration of non-religious themes, and the prominence of the artist as celebrity, where ideas were expressed through skilled application of paint and colour. In many respects, the Renaissance period chimes with the various Humanist preoccupations, environment concerns, social distractions, and opening up of new cultures (the Metaverse, Blockchain and NFT’s, for instance) of our own time.

The paintings of many Renaissance artists were accomplished primarily on surfaces and expanses of board, canvas, or perhaps chapel ceiling – a place where expression, meaning, form and colour became unified on the ‘flat.’ The ‘flat’ is what these painters were good at, and in some regards this is what they had not needed to, or had not known to go beyond.

This understanding of, and adherence to the ‘flat’ is what has since bound many painters and movements together, from the Baroque, to Impressionism, to Cubism, to Minimalism and Perceptual art.

However, key avant-garde movements, expressions, mediums, processes, dimensions or ‘places’ of artwork pursued throughout the 20th Century would go on to contest the dominion of the ‘flat.’ They would lead to the demise and dissolution of the picture frame, plinth or mount, paint and brush strokes, representational objects, the gallery wall, the museum, aspects of time and occasion, and even audiences. These radical revisions and transformations would also serve to extend and abstract the very nature and presence of art and creativity.

So, where much modern art may be distinguished as notably omitting or rejecting aspects of what had defined art previously, can fashion similarly consider what it can radically leave out in order to go beyond the ‘flat?’