A collection of paintings and stories by artists Masi & Jayson Oliveria

It's literally like a jigsaw puzzle that can't fit and is having a fight with itself that's what the painting sort of is to me, um and so I was like, there's pattern there's color, there's shape, there's this jagged thing and then underneath if you say Banana Tree is the title, everyone goes, oh yeah, there are the bananas, so you can kind of ignore the sort of theme or you can just resolve the problem of the painting by the title, and so this kind of relationship between language and image is very, this is my, that's what I do all day, that's all I do is um, go in and out of language. (Amy Sillman)

In many ways, making a painting is also to transcend language, to transcend a sentence. It also means creating something that's more intelligent than the first thing that pops into your head. The artwork should have a gap between image and word, and the viewer should be able to explore this gap. If you think that you need to master symbols and meanings too much in a painting, you'll always make daft paintings. (Tal R)

Painting is a word and paintings are things. And things are what exists. Meaning that what exists is a painting and then a painting, and then a painting. Painting is a concept. As with lots of concepts, you can stretch it… until it encompasses things that apparently bear little relation to the dictionary definition. The photo lies a lot. As a rule, reproductions of paintings are not trimmed, they are cut. They turn paintings into images. This means that the slightest visual clue that is in the image of a painting, and indicates that it is a three-dimensional object, totally disappears in every book. So more or less all books turn paintings, which are objects, painted and handmade, into images printed on a flat surface, which is the same as the image’s surface. See what I mean? We are identifying two very different things. We talk about one of them based on our experience of the other. (Walter Swennen)

I don’t think a painter makes a painting to tell anything to anyone. I have a sensation, I try to find ways to objectify this sensation. Hopefully while painting, I find a new sensation I wasn’t aware of and if I’m lucky the viewer finds something that is meaningful to him also. My work, generally speaking, is about absurdity. I’m painting because I don’t understand what I’m doing on Earth. When I was a child I had an image of God laughing while looking at us from above. Long after that early sensation, I found in the laughter of Democritus the same feeling of absurdity regarding human activity. With my “Nazi Dogs”, people might get stuck to the war thing and not go further, but that’s the game, there are always different ways to look at things. (Gregory Forstner)