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Peter Joch Thingness
Mezzanine
Artist Statement
My work approaches portraiture through strategies of installation and still life. The reason is twofold: to defuse the emotionalism associated with a portrait by bringing out the conceptual as genesis of interpretation and to order the piles of infinite media images through which we experience the world.
I interpret the world through (moving) media images I don’t understand because they are infinite, move too fast, and often have sound. To comprehend these images, I first paint them. Oil painting is a sluggish process that removes sound and stops media images, keeping them intact indefinitely. So, images I only glimpse at for an instant end up in my gaze for weeks while I paint. Thus, I begin to comprehend the (moving) media images.
Then, I use the face as a frame for banal connections between images/objects, lucky/unlucky accidents, from things already loaded with meaning, and from painting. This transforms the face from its everyday function into a metaphor for conceptual processes the viewer uses to create meaning. My body of work is the application of methods to make faces into concepts as spectators’ experience of the face moves from empathy to sense-making and from face to object. Over the years, I have gone from face/abstract shape hybrids to face/object hybrids. Gradually, the face transforms into text and only objects remain. Nowadays, my work develops by looking for traces of painting in real life thereby positioning paintings as minor utopias.