Quote by Max Henry:

“The modernist grid has been given a working-over.

Scanning through the managed chaos of this era of the jpeg, Youtube, social networking and multitasking, artists have to developed new strategies. The heroic, Romantic stances of the mid twentieth century and the search for absolute qualities that drove post-war abstraction have been displaced by personal angst and rage against the homogeneity.

The artists have, however, maintained an engagement with history of abstract painting while conducting their explorations. Experiments with surface material and formalist concerns with shape, line and color segue into theoretical territory. In many ways this is the time for regeneration for painting despite schizophrenic modes of wireless society.”

This is exactly where I see myself. Modernism and post-modernism are forces to take into account; it’s gestures and syntax protrudes society, culturally and politically. Still, the abstract language is relatively young. It is still evolving!

The Japanese cult of cute, manga and old woodcuts are results of art and commerce in union. The boundaries between high and low art are dissolved. Our western hierarchy of art is not applicable on the Japanese art tradition.

I’m interested in pop-culture. Underneath the glossy exterior of pop culture exist contradictory stories. The perfect sunset after a nuclear holocaust. The straight married man getting fucked in a gay sauna. The nervous squid thinking of apocalyptical manga. The dark psychology of things and the apocalypse are always present.

The union of the abstract language and the non-hierarchical view of art, mixed with pop-culture, let’s me investigate visual sampling unsentimentally.

“The “contemporary” now seems to alternate between modernist change and postmodernist remix.“

To me, we are in the middle of what well could be described as modernism 2.0.

In my work I explore the abstract language. Different previously used painterly gestures side by side with the language of popular culture create friction and contrast. To make the contemporary possible, the gestures are dislodged from their previous meaning. They can be filled with new content or just emptied completely dry. It is a non-sentimental use of the painterly tools. I do not wish to undermine, criticize or pay homage to their previous historical meaning. Rather, it is a tradition that I respect.

Abstract is my language. Pop culture is my subject matter. I reference objects to known pop-cultural things. Then displace them to visualize the dark and the unknown.

This is my method to contribute to the evolution of the abstract language