Bad Painting Number 01: Angry men & women beating the hell out of black, yellow, brown, gay people & hairdressers on a lovely Tuesday afternoon. Print

Painting: Acrylic on Canvas. This is the first painting of an on-going series titled Bad Painting. BAD PAINTING is a series of paintings that I would like to categorize as Bad Realism which is work that is bad in terms of style, craftsmanship & content. The badly executed paintings represent the underlying bad reality of the actions depicted. The work challenges the Western sense of beauty, perfectionism and fear of failure. I personally find making this work very liberating as I am not restricted in terms of how well I paint. Rooms are distorted, bodies are out of proportion, shadows fall into the wrong direction etc. The term Bad Painting was coined by the critic and curator Marcia Tucker in the 70s. I have always been fascinated by the freedom of 'bad' painters such as Joan Brown or Neil Jenney. 'Bad' painting doesn't only set me free from the constraints of 'good' & 'decent' technique but also gives me a feeling of everything-goes and everything-is-fine. There are obviously a lot of people who don't like my Bad Painting series very much, not only because of the way they are painted but also due to the themes and subject matters. I think there is only a handful of people who appreciate the work. During the process of working on this series (since early 2013) I have come to terms with the unpopularity of the work and now I simply don't care if people love, like, dislike or even hate my paintings. Jay Rechsteiner’s Bad Paintings (2013) brings the horrors of human culpability front and center. We don’t have to look too far to see the atrocities within our communities. Turn on the news, take an extended walk through familiar streets. Sadness and pain are everywhere. Rechsteiner states that his “main interest [is] in the underlying structure of things [and how] his artworks directly respond to the surrounding environment and . . . everyday experiences.” We so often look for beauty in everything. Why not accept the ugliness of misery? Confront it and learn how to deal with it? Rechsteiner wrestles with these ideas in his studio and asks the same of his veiwer. He wishes to “demonstrate how life extends beyond [our] own subjective limits,” to tell “a story about the effects of global cultural interaction,” and “the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves.” John Ros, GalleryEll

Print:Giclee on Fine Art Paper

Size:10 W x 8 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:15.25 W x 13.25 H x 1.2 D in

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