Painting The Spume Of My Mind – Artist Statement PinXoGraphy

After taking photographic pictures for thirty-five years I felt a little weary and was worrying what photography could be for me in days to come. For with the dawn of Big Data taking and sharing pictures online has lost its innocence, and those trillions of daily added pics being seized by big companies making that old “Wissen ist Macht” finally come true. Just a few examples here and here..

These were two significant points for me to start looking for something new. Something fresh, something exciting, something way out of this modern digital world but mainly:

I craved something I’d never seen before.

Some good reads about painting regaining the predominance over photography finally brought me back to this bulk of old posters of my first band back in the 80ies ( I played the bass guitar), their empty backsides and pastel chalks in summer of 2015.

Since then amazing things happend. With my self-established rule simply being: paint first, then digitally recolour. It turned out to be a seemingly unlimited source of astonishing, never-seen-before pictures, I some day labelled as “Nuancism“, some day as “tangled undergrowth paintings”:

But there’s an abundance of pure stark colour, too:

The question with them is: what comes to mind if you don’t recognize anything immediately?

My answer is: your personal memory.

And: it works automatically, involuntarily. So with these pictures you can get access on things you thought you forgot.

Although this ongoing flowing of pictures – I made a sheer 30 thousands within the last three years out of the 680+ sheets first painted, then processed digitally –

this is not about painting pictures, it’s about stimuli.

So I found a vast test field for the power of the human memory triggered by humble colours and funny shapes avoiding the obvious by simply doodling away in summer 2015. Challenge for (your) looking-on and pareidolic kaleidoscope for a thing called pictorial memory.

But starting painting in 2015 would have been as half as thrilling if it didn’t also bring into account/ignored all the modern wash of pictures that flood our overloaded modern brains.minds. Painting these pictures therefor means deliberately irritating the process of the 13 milliseconds that our brain really needs to judge a picture, thereby (re)calling all your available information, realizing your mind being stamped with/by brand logos, corporate designs and pictorial claims. PinXoGraphy as a serendipitously discovered means to learn that the brain memorizes anything by tickling the looking experience.

For maybe there’s a new-born/resurrected quality of abstract paintings which come to provide an apt echo chamber for elusive modern phenomena like short attention span, nomophobia, burnout, so this obsolete art form may regain new potential.

A potential in exploring areas in life that are hard to express verbally: feelings, premonitions related to social life, human behaviour, feelings towards or impacts of the world of work or that of business, even diplomacy. . Here my first few examples: