Anti-Scrambler Scrambler by Pow Martinez

“I am not an artist, i am a sewage worker.
I paint my inner landscape.
I work with reality, but I dont like reality
I work with rules and limitations
working with time limits,
working less than 2 hours.
I dont paint everyday.”



“In telecommunications, a scrambler is a device that transposes or inverts signals or otherwise encodes a message at the transmitter to make the message unintelligible at a receiver not equipped with an appropriately set descrambling device. Scrambling is accomplished by the addition of components to the original signal or the changing of some important component of the original signal in order to make extraction of the original signal difficult.”

Artists are usually ascribed the role of being a transmitter of reality. But to purport what sort of reality this is has to be defined or determined for the works that an artist makes is themselves a reality of its own as possessed of matterness with its own logic of pictorial plasticity. Some of these gets lost in translation, not because the transmitting device or language used is faulty, but more probably on the subjective bias of each individual viewer, which is another reality altogether. German poet Heinrich Blϋcher asserts that artists don’t really paint reality, not because it’s unnecessary making it redundant or that we’ve gone beyond the mimetic function of art, but rather the artist creates metaphors to perpetuate myths of the supposed qualities of form, in and of itself. Even the supposed “real” is merely reduced form, making them into non-things (as purely pictorial) to make them only conveyors of experience.

And what is to be experienced ? But the actual viewing of the art, and underneath that if it’s made apparent, the process of its making, as Pow had shown an accumulated suite of drawings done for three years, where some were studies for other paintings that had been previously exhibited, aside from the two paintings that are duplicates, or paintings in stereophonic – one in mono, the other in vivid Technicolor. Both titled Aesthetic Police, with 2 clay creatures blasting fire in a camouflage pattern field amidst a rain of regular broken white lines, it’s a play on reversals and suspension of belief, but they’re probably made so out of mirth for the absurd, the funneled dregs of so-called ‘reality’, multiplied and amplified, to drive the point, of not making a point, if there need be a policing still of what is and shouldn’t be seen or pictured. The limits and rules are largely self-regulated, yet within what the senses can fathom. Someone should tell this to real life aesthetic police Long Beach Police Department officer Asif Kahn who relegates as part of his duty rendering aesthetic judgment on pictures taken in Long Beach (as the cause of detention for photographer Sander Roscoe Wolff https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110815/23584515540/police-say-they-can-detain-photographers-if-their-photographs-have-no-apparent-esthetic-value.shtml)