Just imagine to accept a pan-historic blend, damaged like a Faiyum portrait, but shining like a reproduction on glossy paper. All possible influences are packed into a closed space, their backs against the walls or their backs against the clouds, all of them equal.
There : visualise a scenography. Nail down bodies. Make them play. Then contest their presence, pretend they never existed. Perhaps even destroy them. Shine a spotlight on what’s left : watch as the parasites multiply and all that remains is obliterated.
A method ? Do-and-undo.
Undo ? I mean scrape until the underlying levels are on the surface, cross out, burn, disfigure, distort, dissolve. No collages and no photos – that would be too obvious.
Then, to finish, undermine this ageing process by highlighting it, covering it in shadow or dressing it up with trinkets, bits and bobs, gadgets, stuff, things, zip, zilch, nada. Make it shine.
The encapsulation imposed by the sum of these events inflicted on melamine is my favorite process.
This is not an exercise in post-modernism but rather in post-pessimism. This is a forward projection because what excites me above all is not the glossiness of our present time with its cortège of protruding, gleaming problems made up of our crazes and catastrophes, but the speed with which the rust sets in, the changes in state that accompany the passage of time.
It’s there that I wanna dig up and there I let my pickaxe fall ; I confess.
