In this period I explored the visual culture of television as a source for painting. By isolating and rearranging video stills, subtitles, and action scenes, I transform fleeting media images into concentrated paintings. In this way, the painting becomes a place where time, language, and movement are frozen and acquire new meanings.
Materials: oil on canvas
In this series I take movements and actions from television images or my own video material. Using Photoshop, I combine successive video stills into a new composition, which I then translate into paint on canvas. The painting thus becomes a condensation of time: multiple moments brought together in a single pictorial plane.
In this series I use video stills with subtitles taken from television. By carefully combining two to three fragments, a new whole emerges in which language and image unexpectedly reinforce or contradict one another. In this way, the painting becomes a space where meanings shift and where the subtitle plays as decisive a role as the image itself.
In this series I paint video stills of action scenes taken from television. The result is a fixed movement: a moment of intensity captured in paint. The title refers both to the freezing of the image and to the paradox that, even in stillness, action is still present.
For the paintings still in my possession, the stretcher bars were removed. Eyelets were attached around the canvas.
In my possession I still had the oil painting Your Beauty, You Just Knocked Me Out, depicting former president George W. Bush. His words often left me speechless at the time. It couldn’t get any worse… or so I thought then.
In my studio I place canvases of 150 x 150 cm on the floor. I simply walk over them and use them during all sorts of activities. In this way, traces of transformation naturally emerge.
One of these canvases, marked by such traces, led me to the idea of noise: disturbances that obscure the transmission of communication. Today, much of that ‘noise’ is deliberately spread to sow division.
The work was given the title Noise Preacher. It can be opened so that more or less of the preacher becomes visible. The original oil painting is sewn onto the abstract canvas.