Tremolo

/ˈtrɛmələʊ/

a wavering effect in a musical tone produced by rapid reiteration; repeated variation in pitch of a note; or by two notes of slightly different pitches generating overtones.

Proposition 1. Reiteration: What if painting was extruded rather than painted, what if it came out in a continuous roll or tube and could be cut off at any point?  What if colour was not applied to a surface but was the substrate, image and object all at once? Something of this idea was explored by Piero Manzoni and Asger Jorn. Manzoni proposed painting lines on paper of any length, ideally infinite and never ending, with the longest he completed being 7.2 kilometres. It was then signed, dated, fingerprinted, sealed in a large zinc container and exhibited. Barnet Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam Jun Paik and Gutai also explored ideas of the the infinitely unfinished and interminable project of painting. By making industrial extensions across extraordinary lengths of surface they made painting something closer to a spatio-temporal event. In a wave towards the democratic potentials of this process both Asger Jorn and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio made super extended works that could be sold by the metre and cut to any length according to a buyer’s needs.

Proposition 2. Pitch: What if painting could be heard rather than seen? Or what if colour could be seen and heard at the same time? Music and paint can come together by representing an instrument jn a painting, using musical notation as a visual form, being inspired by music to create images, working with musicians in hybrid audio-visual events, all synaesthetically breaking the barrier between the ear and the eye. Visually the sound box of the speaker is close to the rectangular format of the painting and the electronic componentry of a speaker is also laid out on a flat surface much like the elements of a painting, making aspects of each potentially available to the other. Recently speakers have begun to change, coming in any shape and colour, becoming like painting and sculpture, tubular or flat, overt or embedded, coloured or invisible, super flat and absorbed into any environment, facilitating sound coming from everywhere and anywhere.

Proposition 3: Overtone: By adding Proposition 1 to Proposition 2, I can say that my conceptual painting practice is a theory of blend. Blend can describe the visual experience of colour gradually integrating with other colours, different objects forming into a hybrid, the incorporation of different media into a pedagogical/aesthetic environment, or what happens when two cultures come together in a creolisation, as in many settler-colonial environments around the world. Settler colonial colour is creolised between industrial chemical based colour and the colour of pigments embodying the land, of settler landscape art, of Indigenous art, of colour literally dug from the land, from the earth, colour that escapes its image based subservience to become an object, an event, and an idea.

Mark Titmarsh
June 2025