Encountering Surfaces, Encountering Spaces, Encountering Painting

Encounters are immanent to the event of art, whereby an artwork may be understood by way of the singularities, the differences in intensity, it generates. As an event, art expresses encounters between bodies, surfaces, affects, concepts and percepts. Thinking about artworks in these terms opens up the materiality of art, exposing more of its extensive and intensive properties. It also calls attention to the co-constitution of events of art in diverse spatial, temporal and affective encounters. This argument is developed throughout this chapter by way of a description of the author’s painting practice and intensive encounters with the work of Agnes Martin. Art as an event draws attention to the activity of surfaces and the ways encounters between surfaces, immanent to the work, co-constitute the work of art in space and time.