Emblematic imagery of untrue origin. A pet has to smile. A car has a history of hand-jobs.
鈥淚 want to give a form which resists facts, which resists opinion, and which goes beyond actuality, which reaches beyond
information 鈥 that is why I invented the motif 鈥榚ye and its capacity to see everything red鈥欌 The eye doesn鈥檛 need to know
鈥 the eye just sees, and that鈥檚 what counts.鈥
鈥 Thomas Hirschhorn (quoted in 鈥淭ruth or Dare: The Art of Witnessing鈥 by David Joselit, Artforum, 2011)
Small paintings suggest privacy and the tenderness of possession 鈥 possession that tells the double story of commodity:
The frst story of hope and aspiration, fulflment and joy of life.
The second story of the reduction of personal and interpersonal possibilities through the shifting of behaviour into foreseeable
patterns.
Growing up in the 2000s, I often saw an ad for a bank running long-term on German television, trying to appeal to the middleclass, middle-aged man of Germany with the tagline:
鈥淢ein Haus. Mein Auto. Mein Boot.鈥
This translates to: 鈥淢y house. My car. My boat.鈥
My choice of object. My choice of person. My choice of dog.
One of each.
Through painting, there is a chance of returning to non-judgment, where the material fact of what is seen is stronger than its
signifcance in culture. Often I record movies by taking timed screenshots every ten seconds, to get to a place in-between
action.
The impulse to try and identify through possession seems deeply idealist 鈥 to negotiate every day through desire. It is easy to
relate to and hard to leave. Probably so: identity is a toy 鈥 you hit it against the wall again and again, it makes a singing sound.
鈥淚n this beautiful and healthy life it is only I who has been made to sufer,鈥 says the voice-over in The Colour of Pomegranates,
a movie allegedly based on the life of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova but dealing mainly in the language of living images. I often
think about this sentence. It lives in the same universe as Gwyneth Paltrow: 鈥淚 had my frst bowl of gazpacho when I was
ffteen, in Spain, and the impression it made was a lasting one.鈥
In remaking these emblems in painting (one of each), they return to the body. By entering a fctional realm, having such fgures
鈥 a car, a face, a dog 鈥 hollowed, they lose their ties to real conditions. They should become something to defy their category.