DAVID VICTOR FELDMAN
"SEEING AND SEEING—THAT"
JULY 9-AUGUST 1, 2026
DTLA ART NIGHT RECEPTION
THURSDAY JULY 9, 6-10pm
Artist's Statement
With functioning eyes, we see and we see-that. The two acts are simultaneous and dual, and yet distinct. Seeing is immediate, absolute, formal and fundamentally private; seeing-that is cognitive, contextual, metalinguistic and publicly shareable — and it is seeing-that which art criticism, titles, and statements like this one necessarily traffic in. Language will let us agree that we both see that something is blue, but language fails us if we want to compare what it feels like to see blue-in-itself. While visual art cannot help but engage both modalities, artists (and their viewers) usually lean into one or the other.
So it is that Duchamp famously ran down "retinal art," art supposedly just for seeing, and doing so he bequeathed us conceptual art (and there was always also primarily narrative art). If, a century later, the retinal/conceptual/narrative schism remains seemingly crucial, my project involves working across the divide — not by straddling it, but by making the seam itself visible.
The traditional retinal artist builds an image, with paint or pixels, tinkering, hand guided by eye. But I write code, code that defines grammar, grammar that implies a family of images (from which I sample). So I never add a little here and subtract a little there; rather, when I revise, I revise the grammar, and in doing so I change every part of the visible work at once. Code is concepts expressed in precise language. Sol LeWitt composed "scores" that, executed, make pictures; but where LeWitt's wall paintings required teams of human "LeWitt slaves," I have the tedious, even superhuman labor behind my work happen in the automated digital domain.
What I finally bring to you may nevertheless read as retinal — forms and colors and often maximalist density. But the code is available, the grammar is legible, and the viewer who chooses to move between the seen image and its generative rules is enacting precisely the shift between seeing and seeing-that that I take to be underexplored in both traditions. The visual output and the conceptual axioms are not in a hierarchy. They are two aspects of a single thing — the way blue-in-itself and "blue" are: related, mutually illuminating, and finally irreducible to each other.
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