Week 7
I spent the bulk of this week reading and making notes. I felt pretty lost for most of the week. On Staurday there was a Symposium at St. Martins. It was the first of a series of talks/discussions for the Tableau Project. This one was called Fragments, Openess and Contradiction in Painting and Photography. It was quite a long day, but worth the climb up 11 flights of stairs. One of the speakers, Cedric Loire, who gave a talk called What do images do to painting, what does painting do to images, was the most relevant to me at the moment. He spoke about two artists, Robert Suermondt and Terry Costeseque.
Suermondt’s paintings that go beyond the frame that are based upon the urban/suburban environment. His work is a constant reference to the photographic image, showing evidence of digitization. He paints in the way that an editor would edit a film. Photos are taken, images are cut from magazines, these are digitzed and attached to the canvas. Fragments of black and white photos are collages, becoming unrecognisable from the source material. He uses montage, as in cinemas, but done with paintings. More ‘editing’ takes place when the collages are used to make the paintings. There is movement between the images and the planes. The viewers gaze is being disturbed. There is perfect vision and blindness at the same time. Details are extracted from photos and the collages, and are blown up during this editing. He also makes models of spaces that contain copies of his work, and then photographs them.
Costeseque’s source material includes advertisments found in the street or from the net. Signs and textures from urban spaces, like neon signs. The speaker talked of artificiality and superficiality and about using photomanipulation to abstraction.
