Fire Extinguisher Painting

Since the early 90s I have worked as a painter and freelance journalist for several TV networks in Berlin. My journalistic work plays into my art, where my paintings reflect the narrative strategies of modern media. I scan digital media for forgotten images and stories before reprocessing them in the old fashioned analog medium of painting on canvas. My latest series of paintings (like “Whitewashing” or “Residual light”) is focussed on the vanishing of images and the stories behind them. As a TV-journalist I work in a digital fast forward modus, looking for strong topics and finding the appropriate pictures for the stories behind them. I therefore follow very clear and accepted rules in my visual strategy. As an artist, however, I tend to question this media-approach. I view myself as a “visual archaeologist”. TV-stations, like all mass media, are on the one hand huge visual archives that I can browse to find forgotten images and stories. At the same time the sheer amount of pictures they produce mean, that they are also graveyards. But unlike the archaeologist it is not my ambition to reconstruct an “exact” and “objective” image of the lost and found materials in order to learn something about the past. As a painter I am not interested in pure documentary work. Instead I use those lost and found images as raw material to interpret the story behind the images in my own very subjective way, looking for a valid iconography and “meta-story” that is only in part accessible to description. And unlike the archaeologist, who reveals his findings layer by layer, I cover my pictures with layers in order to “protect” them. Corresponding to this approach, I employ a sort of pointillistic painting technique that relates to my work as a TV-journalist: digital pixels are substituted by analog dots and splashes in order to evoke the beauty of a flat random noise on a disturbed TV-Screen. It’s an image that has almost been forgotten and is perceived as a dysfunction in times of HD and digital broadcasting. These blurred, grubby, mixed-media paintings try to hide more than they reveal. You really have to make an (almost investigative) effort if you want to see the picture and the story behind it. But the closer you get, the less you see.