Artist Statement
Skinned pictures – pictured skins.

Painting as activity but also as a symbolic space is always a highly speculative endeavor to me. In my work I try to dissect, deconstruct, and re-evaluate (mainly within the limits of the activity painting) the customs, expectations and myths that painting as part of our visual culture brings along. I try to engage with painting as a process, as a possible activity that goes beyond making an individual picture, but includes the making of pictures (as an ongoing series) as well as a staging of the space that a viewer experiences painting in, that asks questions about the display of artwork and addresses and highlights problems of support structures in art (material/architectural but also ideological). I hope to open up the sphere in which painting can be seen and understood and try to engage in a discursive field by including some form of outside within the process or the presentation of the work. This functions e.g. within collaborative efforts or through the inclusion of aspects of performance or other genres within the presentation of the work. I try to keep my process open to a parallel development of the conceptual and the material aspects of the work and try to find possibilities of not privileging one over the other.


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Q: Are you still there?

A:  Sure, I still am.  But I try to keep up some form of instability in that decision.  Everything I do or would do also uses the forms of reference systems that I grew up with and that I have been educated with and that can also be really interesting, but I don’t want them to be the core of the work.  I don’t want the work to be a device that points towards other things and that’s it.  There are some moments when that might be really helpful, and good for the work, but there are other situations where it’s very easy to lose oneself in these realms and then purely function within referentiality. 

Q:  Then it’s just a matter of checking things off.

A:  Exactly, and that can’t be it.  It just becomes another dominant mode of organizing things, another form of hierarchy: we all agree that this is important, so let’s make work that comments on a specific cultural state of things.  And then, if you’re part of that, the work is serious and fulfills all the parameters of what an artwork should fulfill, and if doesn’t, you can’t be sure.  It might not be smart enough, or it might not be founded enough.  And I think that space is really more interesting. 

Q: Where the work creates a space for itself, outside of a sphere of agreement?

A:  Or inside the sphere of agreement, but it creates something other than the agreed upon parameters.  And what that really is, I don’t know.  I can’t say – but when I look at art, I realize more and more that a lot of the moments I’m interested in are frictions or destabilizations that exactly occur on the edge of agreement and total disaster.  Where you can’t really put your finger on it, and it’s even beyond some linguistic place where you could verbalize what’s happening. 
I always wanted to not make a straight-forward version of the work that I wanted to be doing. My interest in how to make art, or what an art object or project could be always includes trying to destabilize what I myself would want to do, as a form of not falling into the trap of just reproducing certain kinds of hierarchical structures, or dominant structures, but just from a different point of view. I was thinking about this a lot recently – something like creating a self-induced identity crisis. To keep on going and to keep on questioning one’s own decisions and desires, to cope with the problem that really exists. We already have a trained disbelief in art - it is already institutionalized that we are skeptical of the power structures, because all the questioning of power and dominant styles has already happened. You always have a justification to – let me think how to phrase this best… If skepticism is fixed as dominant mode, it becomes really problematic to find where art could create new open space, because the dominant discourse brings forth the belief that art’s still about this skepticism towards power.  Depending on what group you come from, this power could be different things – it could be capitalism, or popular culture, it could be painting…

Q:  And this constricts the possibilities of the work itself.  Then the work has to dutifully show both sides and always catch up with itself. 

A: It starts to be just a reproduction of the same structures that were criticized at some point.  An agreed-upon force-field, whatever the dominant mode is at the moment.
The actual question that I want to get at is not located in painting materially; it lies outside of it and painting is just a good way, because it’s such a prominent and nearly banal form of art. It’s a good way to get into that abstract head-space, basically, the cultural illusion of what art is.  It’s nearly as if painting as this sign that includes all the elements of making the painting, showing the painting, and being the painting, captures condensed fear.  It’s so occupied by all these illusions and ideas and hopes and fears about what art is or could be. So – it might just be a good platform.