Toward a Living Community of Perception

Artist Statement: Toward a Living Community of Perception

André Martinez-Reed

My work grows from a conviction that art is not primarily a cultural product, but a mode of perception. I do not approach painting as commentary or illustration, but as a practice of attention—an effort to remain receptive to inner movement and to give it form without forcing explanation. For me, art begins before language, in a state of listening that resists haste and resists certainty.

I write as a practicing artist, not as a historian, critic, or cultural manager. I write from within the very contradictions Mark Tobey named so clearly in his essay Art and Community—contradictions that remain almost unchanged today. Tobey’s influence on my thinking has been both practical and ethical. He insisted that art arises from inward necessity rather than intellectual ambition or cultural fashion, and that insistence feels even more urgent now than in his time.

Modern society generates enormous activity around art: lectures, readings, panels, institutions, degrees, archives. Yet alongside this abundance of discourse, there is often a striking scarcity of artists—by which I mean not people who produce objects, but people allowed the conditions necessary to truly see. Artists today are frequently asked to explain themselves before they are allowed to look. Intuition is tolerated only after it has been translated into approved language. Silence is suspect. The inward life—the true source of art—is treated as insufficient unless externally validated.

My work resists that reversal. I am less interested in arriving at conclusions than in sustaining a state of listening. Process matters more than assertion. Meaning is not imposed; it accumulates slowly through repeated looking, patience, and trust in perception. When art is over-determined by language, it loses its capacity to function as lived experience. I believe art regains its vitality when it is permitted to remain partially unknown—even to the artist.

I am equally concerned with the position of the viewer. Many people desire direct contact with art but have been trained, often unconsciously, to distrust their own responses. They defer instead to authorities, histories, critics, and frameworks. While knowledge has value, it cannot substitute for encounter. An extensive education in art history may provide a magnificent scholastic approach yet still leave the eyes unopened while the mouth repeats names, dates, and accepted interpretations. Composition, color, and form are discussed endlessly, while the living experience of seeing remains distant.

This is not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of trust. Tobey understood that art is not entered through accumulation, but through exposure—through risk, vulnerability, and sustained attention. My work aims to reopen that space: to invite engagement before explanation, and to allow meaning to remain provisional. I hope the viewer feels permitted to stand in front of the work without needing to arrive anywhere.

That Mark Tobey found fuller recognition outside his own country remains instructive. It reflects a broader cultural difficulty in accommodating work that is inward, slow, and resistant to immediate clarity. His international recognition—particularly in Europe—stood in contrast to the hesitations he encountered at home, not because his work was obscure, but because it refused easy explanation. This was not a rejection of America, but a quiet revelation of its impatience.

Yet this history does not lead me to pessimism. On the contrary, it clarifies the task. The conditions Tobey described persist because the need they address is permanent. People still hunger for meaning, coherence, and participation in something larger than themselves. What is missing is not desire, but permission—permission to look slowly, to feel without instruction, to trust one’s own perception.

I see art as a quiet form of resistance: resistance to speed, to over-articulation, and to the belief that understanding must always precede experience. But it is also an offering. When art functions as perception rather than product, it creates the possibility of a different kind of community—one formed not around agreement or expertise, but around shared attention.

Such a community cannot be efficiently organized. It emerges gradually, when artists are allowed to work inwardly and viewers are allowed to meet the work directly. In this sense, art is not separate from community; it is one of the ways community remembers how to see.

If my work succeeds, it does so not by persuading or instructing, but by holding attention—long enough for something essential to surface. In that sustained moment of looking, I believe art still has the power Tobey recognized: not to explain the world, but to deepen our presence within it.