Painting by Numbers by Dr Ken Fernstein

What is a digital image? If it is an image created by the manipulation of digits by a program, then Rajinder Singh’s portraits are digital art. The fact that he doesn't use a computer is irrelevant. An issue for those who need to protect their fiefdom’s. What is happening  is a very complex and dense use of numbers and mathematics. How do we use numbers? What does it say? What can it say? What can’t it say?

The theorist Vilem Flusser has written about how the text as image came to a crisis point in the early 20th century.¹ The crisis was came about when the written word became incomprehensible. To make his point, he doesn't go to Joyce or the Surrealists, but to Einstein. E=mc², a simple statement that means more than it can contain. How do we understand this? Go back to visual images. Images based on concepts, mathematics and technology. What Flusser calls the “technical image”. An not an image of technique, but an image of technology. Singh’s images are images of both technique and technology. They pile numbers upon numbers, until images appear. The text passes through its own crisis of meaning, coming through the other side as pure image. A face, the face of a woman springs out of the numbers. the theoretical comes back to the human. How he got there remains unreadable, but we don’t care. We have arrived with him to a gaze that looks back at us as much as we look at it.

This gaze is made of numbers literally piled on top of each other. Mapping the face as we do a mountain. Singh asked where can we find the emotion in numbers. This is where it is, in the peaks and valleys of the face. The building up of layers of colour tagged to different number sets. These numbers sets could be stock quotes, flight schedules, scores from the Premier League, the seemly disconnected events, which make up our life. And we turn to the face to see the culmination of our life. We “read” a face for this. The cliche goes that the eyes are the windows of the soul, but the face is the map of experience.

Singh began this collection of faces by asking where is the “lovely” in mathematics. Einstein defined the best scientific and mathematical solutions as the simplest and most elegant. The most elegant is an aesthetic judgement. Here is the art in math. We understand, no we expect the aesthetic judgement in art. The aesthetic helps us define the form of the language of art. Like the rules for the construction of a sentence. Math being among other things the language of science. Yet Einstein is defining the scientific by the artistic. Wittgenstein proved that something can not be defined as a subset of itself. So we have to go elsewhere to define what makes the scientific. The amateur violinist Einstein knows that we have to go to an older system to legitimate the scientific system. If the aesthetic can be used to define science and math is its language than the lovely can be found there. Humming through with Pythagoras'  celestial harmonies. We should never forget that math and music are tied so tightly together that it can be hard to untangle them.

The lovely is not found in the numbers themselves, but in how the numbers are used. The place where the digits are used to create meaning. Many philosophers have agreed that meaning is created by the relationship, the give and take of the conversation. This conversation can be between people or a work of art and a viewer, a book and a reader or even a mathematician and an algorithm.  The relational is the core of the artistic experience. It is a conversation each side enters into. Jean-Franзios Lyotard  sees this as part of game theory². Emmanuel Levinas finds G-d there³. Here we are back to the gaze. The work looks at us knowing that we are looking at it. It is a gaze looking for its return. The return is the play of the game. We set the rules and we engage. It is Lyotard’s conversation. It is the relational. An inclusive act. An ethical act. An act which as draws on in to respond, to finish the conversation. Because with out the other of the viewer, it is just a monologue going out to nowhere. The work calls, we respond. It asks, we answer. We may ask of the work and demand an answer back, but we can not do this with out answering first.

Play, playfulness, things we forget to think about with art any more. As statements like this one are written and as theorists become critics, works are discussed very solemnly. Maybe too solemnly. Singh’s paintings are combining two things that are playful in nature - algorithms and painting. Algorithms are an important element in game theory. Game theory drives much of the mathematics being developed today. It is used in creating the probabilities used for forecasting the weather, quantum mechanics and managing hedge funds. But at its heart is the concept of play. Flusser talks about play in relation to the use of an apparatus, such as a computer.⁴ We experiment when we play. We try it one way and then try it another until we like what we get. This is the way we live in our digital world. Every day as we use our computers more and  we are playing more and more. It has become the nature of how we work. It is the nature of how we create work. It is some thing we have learned from art. It is how we can strive to find the lovely in numbers, art or life. Here is where Rajinder Singh finds his worlds coming together.

1     Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.

2     Thebaud, Jean-Loup and Jean-Franзois Lyotard. Just Gaming, University of Minnesota      Press, 1985

3     Levinas, Emanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, Continuum Internationa Publishing   Group, 2006.

4     Flusser, Vilйm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000.

Milenko Pravacki  ( cultural medallion in visual arts 2012, Singapore) on Rajinder Singh's paintings

Rajinder Jit Singh paints close up “faces” of his personal acquaintances and personal idols from his environment, which he likes and adores and finds beautiful. Seemingly simple and rooted in the age-old ambition of artists formed by the science and pursuit of beauty.But if to this beauty we add a calculated, constructed and printed mask with an opening for eyes and mouth (and ears) this mathematical formula of “beauty” and the total symmetry of the face, things get more complicated.

Leonardo Da Vinci believed that one must search for art in science and for science in art, and that there are precise rules and regulations in physics and mathematics when constructing a painting: the rules of proportion, harmony and symmetry.

As a mathematician it is natural that Rajinder searches for the exact formulas which both Leonardo and Durer sought. Printed and mathematically calculated mask is pulled over all the faces to give the paintings that axiom of beauty and perfection for which Rajinder aims. Introducing the static and fixed element into the painting contributes to a “cooling” of the exterior, the physical over the soulful, the “internal” of the chosen face. The true character of the painted faces is obvious only in the openings for the eyes, mouth (and ears). It is as if the painter spoon feeds us beauty with a small drip, allowing us to preempt what hides behind the perfection of the formed face. These are the only little sparks of the reduced personalities which truly are joyous and show that the face behind the mask lives, dreams and feels, all the properties which mathematics and precise sciences can not calculate.

Another method dealing with “internal beauty” is obvious in Byzantine painting, which Rajinder unconsciously applies and in that way abandons the “easy” graphical decorative portraits of Andy Warhol, these historical portraits being a strong reference. The layered application of paint creates a sensitive pictorial space, which is simplified with the clean background.

As a pragmatic mathematician and creative, Rajinder purposefully suppresses segments of the personality of the “new aesthetics” of the 21^st century, which is more accessible in content rather than image.

He also follows the historical discourse of academic harmony, which is almost forgotten and reappears again and again in his paintings as a remake.

In this century of aggression and superheroes the attempt to revive the idea of beauty as an aesthetic category seems a bit utopian, as the violent, bloody scenes don’t go so well with the classical symmetry and beauty of “healthy” faces that surround us and remind us of love.

CHIMERA by Isabel Lofgren (artist/educator)

I have often wondered about the so-called mirror-stage much talked about in the field of psychoanalysis, maybe Lacan, if I remember well.  It deals with some sort of primal identification of the infant with the face of the mother. Then there is the encounter of the same infant with his own mirror image, where at first glance, he does not recognize himself but rather sees the image of another person, his "otherness". 

My rudimentary understanding is this: looking at a face, any face, even the face on this canvas (supposedly mine - I was the model) is the only means of understanding oneself and the surrounding world. We want to be absorbed by that other-worldliness and also find a likeness or mere identification: we need to stare at eyes staring back at us for a sense of acknowledgment. Simple. 

As I confronted  these eyes on this canvas, supposedly my own gaze, I made a vain attempt to look for this mirror sensation. Yet here, I experienced a virtual encounter with what I once knew as my own face, now magnified twenty-fold, green, with a funny likable gaze staring back at me (or at you). 

The mirror, if this painting ever was one (I have my doubts), caused a discomforting encounter of the me with the I with the myself, and I erroneously embarked on a archaeological expedition through that surface digging for some kind of verisimilitude inside what was supposedly this  "other" version of me. Futile endeavor. 

Impossible to grasp at a glance, one is left looking at this image in parts that constitute the whole, with eyes transfixed on the surface like a percussionist must have his ear close to the vibration of his drum. Close to that painted surface one finds the atomic substance of the smaller equations that construct the overall surface color. There is everything a small universe should contain: a stroke, numbers  a pixel, hidden meanings and spurious references - a territory to explore. This is not a surprise for a painter-cum- mathematician like Rajinder who oscillates between the logic of numbers and the logic of sensation. 

There was no subliminal identification to be found there, this has nothing to do with the model, the face, or even the penetrating gaze, this is not and never was to be intended as a mirror or even metaphor, or even a portrait. That landscape of a face with its microcosms, there, that construction on that canvas on that wall in that room, is the artist's own chimera. 

(I found some other thing there that was not me, something important. Something you should also be able to find, just stare back.)