Die Entstellte (The Blemished)

ca. 170 x 170 cm / oil on canvas

The problem of the modern human is his materiality. The fact, that we are physical creatures is insufferable for the modern man. We are touchable, smellable, present. Our materiality makes us slow going, avoids omnipresence. Apparently, digital social network sites seem to bring the solution. It makes us favoured people, gives us hundreds of so called friends, and enables us to be all over the world at once. Apparently.

In fact, it´s a dream world, which creates real desires, and dependencies.

Human has to accept his physical presence, his evolution from nature, as one day the freedom that digitalism seems to be able to offer us will be the acid, that dissolves us in our dependency.

Frank Schirrmacher writes in his book "payback" (translated by me from german into english):

"We are being eaten by the fear to miss out on something, and by the force to consume every information. We will lose our independent thinking, as we don´t know what´s important, and what isn´t. Furthermore we will subdue ourselves under the dictatorship of the machines. THe thinking exceeds from the inner, and moves onto digital platforms.

The feeling, that life is predetermined mathematically, and nothing changes destiny is one of the effects of overflow of information."

pixação attack

my research about construction and deconstruction reminded me of a action of pixação painters in brazil / sao paolo. on september 6th, 2008 choque was showing a collection of paintings by well-known "street artists" gerald laing, speto and titi freak among others,

when a group of 30 individuals stormed into the gallery brandishing spray cans. the group 'tagged' the entire gallery, also over the artwork hanging. on the walls. the organizer of the pixação attack stated in a message to other members, that the intention of the act was to protest against the ‘marketing, institutionalization and domestication of street art’. they want it to remain in the streets, reaching a mass audience and owned by no one. after the invasion the gallery was (in my opinion) visually much more surprising and interesting than before. the clean, framed artworks made from so called street artists have nothing of the noncompliant attitude graffiti once had. it visualizes how deconstruction, or destruction is actually always constructive.

i think it´s maybe also a good example of the visualisation of chaos and order.

construction vs deconstruction

A theme get more and more interested in is destruction or vandalism. This game between construction and deconstruction, and howthey are dependent to each other. what is being seen as construction, and what is being seen as deconstruction.

in graffiti there are crossers, mostly kids who destroy others writers work with found spraycans, mostly just for fun, sometimes unconciously, because they can´t differentiate between a good graffiti piece, and tagging and spraycan vandals. they are just trying to make their own marks.

so here are a few pictures i found in an old mag from brian a shabaglian, who pasted a poster of marily monroe in public, and then noticed, how people interact with them.

these images in the mag reminded me of the very famous photo shooting with bert stern, where marilyn monroe crossed out the contact slides she didn´t want to become published . Quite ironic, that these photos became one of the most successful - and most published. A good example where destruction becomes construction - very successful construction.

mother of povacrvs - nicolas pol

my first exhibition that I saw in london this spring, and it was a quite lovely one. nicolas pol was a completely new name for me (yes, shame), so I was happy to get this recommodation. it was curated by Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld.

great combination of silkscreen and dirty, expressive painting on quite a large scale, but crappy stretched canvas.

two pictures of nicolas pol´s work

by the way, paint was still wet.

Project Proposal

Proposal