ARTIST’S NOTE | 12
Pictoriality
2018-2024
Pictoriality does not concern the beauty of what looks like a painting. It is not a matter of imitation but of how color, line, and rhythm on a surface breathe together as a single order — the precise moment when sensation transforms into thought. Painting is not a mirror of what is seen, but a search for the principle that makes seeing possible. When I speak of pictoriality, I am not referring to representation, but to the way existence reveals itself upon a surface.
In the Middle Ages, the image was symbolic. The picture plane was not a copy of reality but a field where divine order was made visible — a sacred surface rather than a window. With the Renaissance, Leonardo and Raphael persuaded the eye through perspective, creating a new logic of light and form. Their pictoriality was an illusion of the world opening like a window. Later, Cézanne investigated the structure of perception itself, and Monet turned fleeting light into the rhythm of time. By the time of Pollock, illusion disappeared completely. Pictoriality became an event — the instant when matter and gesture collided upon the surface, and painting ceased to represent, becoming instead the phenomenon of being itself.
Within the world of BYR, pictoriality is not fixed. It shifts between restraint, concentration, and modulation. BYR Prime Elements reduces color and form to structural order, minimizing painterly expression until only the logic of composition remains. Quad does not erase pictoriality but holds it in a state of tension: the brush traces left on the surface are not depiction, but the rhythm of concentration — a residue of thought. In OS, pictoriality breathes again. The combined symbols and layered structures vibrate organically, where sensation and order intertwine. Here, painting functions not as the central force but as a harmonized undertone, a subtle resonance of feeling within structure.
Even in an age saturated with images, pictoriality persists. It no longer depends on pigment but on how sensation turns into order and order returns to sensation. It asks not “what is painted,” but “how is something made visible.” Like David Hockney exploring rhythm and color on digital screens, pictoriality reconstructs the logic of perception beyond medium or time.
To understand this concept is to cease seeing paintings as beautiful images. One begins to perceive how color breathes, how lines move, how surfaces create tension and evoke thought. The viewer no longer stands apart as a passive observer, but participates in reading the rhythm between sensation and structure.
Though pictoriality changes its form across history, its essence remains constant — it asks how existence breathes within visual order. In the BYR series, pictoriality is restrained, sustained, or modulated; each difference traces a way in which the structure of being translates itself into the language of sensation.